Pic and Mix

August 10, 2009 at 22:02 | In Life, the Universe, and Everything | Leave a Comment
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Unfortunately decorating the bathroom is higher up the to do list than blogging at the moment — I’d rather be blogging as I’ve yet to gas myself typing on a computer! — so I haven’t had a chance to mention some cool and interesting things that have been cluttering up my list of open browser tabs. While I wait for the paint fumes to subside before going to bed, here are a few of them, in no particular order…

First from the Mix and Mash Blog, and giving this post its title, Pic and Mix project from Kent County Council: I wonder if Eastleigh do anything similar.

From John’s Random Musings, Exposing your WebSphere logs as ATOM feeds: definitely want to give this a try with MDM Server.

From knolleary.net, Twitterlogue: wish twitter had been around when I was in New Zealand. Brilliant.

From developerWorks, Leverage DataPower SOA Appliances to extend InfoSphere Master Data Management Server security capabilities: looks interesting but I haven’t had a chance to read it in detail yet.

And finally, also from developerWorks, two new articles for the user interface generator:

The IET gets sociable

April 28, 2009 at 22:05 | In Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
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I recently read Yes, we can twitter while catching up on some E&T reading. Probably the most interesting bit for me was seeing @TheIET is also on twitter, so I tore off the bottom of the page with the link on to check out. Web 0.1 bookmarking then; I still like reading on paper.

The IET twitter account doesn’t look like it’s progressed beyond getting their brand on there; they don’t follow anyone, have a surprisingly small 168 followers and don’t seem to be talking to anyone. Still, hopefully it’s just a small beginning and, amongst the links to their web site, I did spot a press release about the launch of the new IET social networking site! That news somehow passed me by until now, so I’ve been investigating to see what it offers. To start with, I have yet another profile, which is not a big surprise. Earlier today I was scratching my head over a spiced up developerWorks profile. It has a bookmarking service which, for anyone in the IET new to such things is great. While I already use delicious for my own bookmarks, IET Discover combines bookmarks with groups, in what looks quite a similar way to Lotus Connections. There’s already a good selection of groups, although I’ve not found any that appear that active yet. Groups have always been a bit of a mystery to me in things like Facebook, never quite fulfilling their apparent potential, mostly ending up little more than a way to tag yourself as being interested in something.

Talking of tagging, from what I can tell on first look, I can tag my own profile, but other people can’t tag me, which seems like a missed opportunity. I think there’s much more value in tagging other people. In networks where you can tag yourself, I tend to have a poor attempt to start with, and then never return to keep the tags up-to-date.

And finally, I can watch people… except so far I’ve not found anyone to watch. I’m guessing it’s much like adding people to your delicious network.

Overall, it’s an interesting foray into the world of social networking. Like LinkedIn, it has a more professional focus, but it feels more limited by association with a single professional body. With recent homecamp, arduino and related projects in mind, I joined the electronic circuits group, but there are already more established social networks around those topics, whether IET members or not. Having said that, I think there is a place for more focused social networks. For example, I’m a big fan of developerWorks, where I’ve been trying to get some momentum for a community around the MDM Workbench, which is after all a pretty niche topic. So IET Discover looks interesting, and it has the potential to get me more involved in the IET. Time will tell how it turns out… maybe @TheIET will share their view…

Tweetup spotted outside London

April 1, 2009 at 12:48 | In Life, the Universe, and Everything | 1 Comment
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Last night I went along to my first ‘proper’ tweetup. I’ve had minor tweetups with friends and fellow Hursley tweeps before, mostly involving a nice cup of tea and a sit down, but all the big tweetups seem to be in London. (Or Reading, but who’d want to go there?!)

PR gurus, students, lecturers, web designers, application developers, personal trainers, salsa dancers, cake bakers, comedians, film makers, journalists, metaverse evangalists, entrepreneurs and those new to twitter were in the basement of Dock Gate 4 for the first Tuesday Tweetup. Not sure how many people came in total, but @Tuesdaytweetup’s (Lisa’s) efforts meant there were more than enough people to talk to in one evening.

Without Pokens, QR codes, Cityware, or a decent memory to be sure, I think I met @_hb, @RAndyVee, @DanShilcock, @CatStormont, @jonsa57 and of course @Tuesdaytweetup (who did I miss?!), and heard some great stuff about an ultimate set top box project (in need of Linux hardware driver guru) and owl flavour cakes.

I didn’t recognise many people at the tweetup (most of the Southampton tweeps I do follow weren’t there) but it was also good to catch up with @epredator and @cminion.

All the signs are that the Tuesday Tweetup will be a regular event and in the mean time, the second OpenWeb Southampton is on soon. (I guess there’s still no Southampton network in Facebook yet though.)

Social radar

November 16, 2008 at 14:32 | In Ones and Zeros | 5 Comments
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Some technologies change the way you do things. Before mobile phones you had to plan where and when to meet people in advance. Before PVRs it was easier to watch TV when the show you wanted to see was on, unless you found a tape which you were at least vaguely sure didn’t have anything on you wanted to watch again, not to mention the ten minutes needed to set the VCR to record… on the wrong channel yet again! Radio, antibiotics, electricity, cars, planes, the internet, the wheel; the list goes on.

Earlier this year Twitter gave me a glimpse of something with the potential to rival even the microwave oven. Twitter is almost pointless in its simplicity: just answer the question, “What are you doing?” In most cases you’ll probably be wondering, “Who cares?” If you need convincing, there’s a very good guide to Twitter on YouTube. The real revelation for me was the power of Twitter on the move. You can still send updates using SMS, but at its peek you could also receive them, either from direct messages, people you were following or (and this was the life changing one) any updates that contained words you wanted to track. I got in the habit of tracking places I was about to visit, giving me local knowledge of things to check out/avoid, traffic/travel problems, other people in the area- what ever people were saying.

Last week could have provided another great example: I tracked ‘Hursley’ which is where I work, so on Thursday I would have got an SMS telling me that the site was closed because of a burst water main. Sadly Twitter has been on a steady decline ever since I started using it, so it was only by chance I checked Twitter before leaving for work. Without tracking, without SMS notifications and without IM, twitter has gone from personal radar to little more than Facebook status updates.

I haven’t given up using it just yet though. In fact I’ve just been cutting down the number of people I follow so I can keep up more easily; 80 is about enough for me. I don’t have any set rules about who I follow like some people, otherwise Martin would have gone just for the amazing number of ‘#’s he gets through! A good way to stay in the list is to make me laugh, and it’ll be hard to beat, “Convinced people are practising yogic flying in the meeting room near me“! After much agonizing I even unfollowed Stephen Fry despite him being nice enough to follow me back- still a huge fan but somehow felt a bit too stalkerish. Having said that, Robert Llewellyn is too interesting to unfollow just yet.

Not Mashed

June 24, 2008 at 23:44 | In Life, the Universe, and Everything | Leave a Comment
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Last weekend saw the second London Hackday, now called Mashed, and it was great to hear that CurrentCost mania is continuing to spread, with Rich and Dale’s CurrentCost Live project winning the Guardian prize! (See the presentation that led to fame and fortune on YouTube!)

Rich and Dale weren’t the only people from Hursley at Mashed, nor were they the only winners! Steve Godwin also had a winning entry with Twitter on TV. (No video that I can find as yet!)

I missed this year’s hack day but it looks like Mashed was another great weekend, even keeping up the tradition of opening the roof from last year! There were some members of team supernova back again and hacking though. Paul was interviewed about his project(s) on the day, and still had time to get Travel Streamr working. Jim’s call for Carbon Goggle helpers clearly worked and you can see the results in action on YouTube.

Mashed might be over but I hope that doesn’t mean the end to the projects it created. SLorpedo has certainly made one or two appearances since last year. Watch out for more CurrentCost, TV Twittering, Travel Streamr and Carbon Goggles in the months ahead. (I’m also on the look out for more details about the other projects, so leave a link if you have one.)

Update: finding a few of the twitter bots that got a mention to add to the tweetjects @jthouse follows. Also discovered that Carbon Goggles made an appearance in the BBC news article on the event. (25 June 2008)

Giveup vs. catchup

May 28, 2008 at 22:58 | In Life, the Universe, and Everything | Leave a Comment
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I haven’t read many blogs lately (I blame Technorati favourites going AWOL… erm, and I’ve been a tad busy). I could do the same as Kelly and declare blog bankruptcy but I thought I’d try something different. I’ve had a skim through and these look kind of interesting:

Let me know if any of them are worth reading properly!

House blogject/tweetject experiments

May 3, 2008 at 23:34 | In Ones and Zeros | 1 Comment
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Now that I have my home server pretty much sorted, I’ve had a chance to start experimenting with a few ideas for what to actually do with it.

It’s already publishing CurrentCost data, along with several others, but it’d be nice to do a bit more. One thing that is definitely on my to do list is to hook it up to Twitter. Andy’s house uses Twitter to communicate, which is getting some interest. It’s easy to twitter something from a home server, although not quite so easy to make it interesting, or at least not way too talkative and repetitive. Plus Twitter is a fantastic way to get text message alerts from your house (and a million and one other uses).

The other thing I’d quite like is a nice web based dashboard to replicate some of the information on the CurrentCost screen, but it’s only a tiny home server and, while it does run XAMPP, there’s not much memory left afterwards. It would also be kind of nice to avoid any security holes by not running my own web server. I’ve done a few experiments and it looks like WordPress is the perfect answer: I’ve added a House page which I can update with Google graphs using mtsend.py. The alternative would be to use new posts each time, which would be great to keep a history but that would probably fill up my weblog with even less interesting stuff than is already here!

Quite pleased with the results so far. Now I just need to actually automate some of it!

Twitter tracking, hashtags, BarCampBrighton2 and the return of SLorpedo

March 15, 2008 at 23:47 | In Ones and Zeros | Leave a Comment
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Since I started using twitter I’ve used the SMS notifications for about an hour in total. I do occasionally use the web interface from my phone but most of the time I’d rather not have interruptions from text messages all the time while I’m out and about. So when twitter introduced tracking, I didn’t take much notice, being a largely SMS feature (it does IM as well, but I don’t).

Until yesterday that is.

Having recently had a couple of twitter related tweetups in Hursley I was having a look at hashtags and decided to give tracking a go as well. The first thing I decided to track turned out to be so unpopular that I didn’t think it was working at all! So I switched to something that might feature in a few more tweets… too many as it turned out! I was about ready to give up on tracking when I learned that SLorpedo was going to make a reappearance at BarCampBrighton2, so I gave tracking on more shot. This time it worked perfectly- I’ve been clearing out the house and off doing viewings all day so didn’t have time to keep an eye on Arcanum for signs of life but just before dinner the phone buzzed as Rachel then Nigel tweeted about SLorpedo and I just about caught the end of the game in Second Life when I logged in! Very cool! (Watch out for SLorpedo tweeting as well!)

I didn’t need as much convincing that hashtags would be good but they proved handy too, revealing some photo’s of the latest SLorpedo outing very nicely in the aggregated media for #BarCampBrighton2.

Back to packing boxes!

SLorpedo Tweets

March 8, 2008 at 23:19 | In VU | 2 Comments
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If plants can twitter, bridges can twitter and houses can twitter, why not mixed reality games? To find out, I’ve created a SLorpedo twitter account to experiment. To make it simple to find any SLorpedo games in world I’m planning to tweet locations using TinySL. Twitter also seems like a really nice way to get the score back out of Second Life; at the moment the score is only shown inside Second Life, but I quite like the idea of using a virtual world to work out the score for a real life game without ever logging in!

I also think that twitter might be an interesting way to keep track of object keys and channel keys inside Second Life, without needing my own server. So instead of copying a channel key from the Second Life client, the SLorpedo program could find out the key from Twitter… maybe.

To spiral further into mixed reality confusion, I’m also trying to display the SLorpedo Twitter feed back inside Second Life using QTtext. QTtext is a really simple way to display text on a prim using a plain text file and a media texture (even simpler than HTML on a prim which is on its way at last) and I’m hopeful that a bit of XSLT on a Twitter RSS feed will do the trick nicely.

Watch this space!

Strictly pancake cooking- live!

February 5, 2008 at 19:00 | In Life, the Universe, and Everything | 4 Comments
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This may turn out to be a complete disaster but I’m going to attempt live twittering as I make pancakes in a Gordon Ramsey style cookalong live!

I’ll update this post with the results later but to follow events in real time, follow me on twitter!

Updated: still very full of pancake! Here’s how it went…

Hope to have some photos of the event up at some point too- Jo got a good action shot!

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