Ben Francis

An article on IEEE spectrum talks about Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt's project called Parakey.

Details are very sketchy at the moment but it sounds like Parakey is aiming to address some problems very close to my heart. It sounds like Free Software designed to replace (or supplement) your operating system with a unified interface where your desktop meets the web. Importantly it appears to offer a solution to the “offline problem” and other important Post-PC concepts. The interesting bits are on page 3. I look forward to hearing more about this project.

The Web Science Research Initiative was launched on Thursday by MIT and the University of Southampton. It aims to establish a new multidisciplinary field of science to study both the social and technological issues surrounding the development of the World Wide Web and other web-like information structures.

The new publication, Foundations and Trends in Web Science could make interesting reading for those interested in the past and future of the web, as an object of scientific study.

I've finally got around to plugging in the X10 home automation kit that arrived in the post last week, courtesy of the lemon.

I ordered the basics:

• CM12U – Serial X10 Computer Interface
• LW10U – X10 Wall Dimmer
• LM12U – X10 Lamp Module

So far I've plugged the computer interface into a PC, plugged a 20W desk lamp into the lamp module and tried controlling the lamp using bundled Windows software. There was a horrible buzzing sound coming from the lamp module, the lamp only just managed to light up very dimly and playing with the “dim” feature resulted in a precarious display of flashing which I thought was going to blow the bulb! I wonder if these problems would be solved by using a different lamp rated higher than 20W, but I'm not really sure what's causing them.

The equipment completely failed successfully transmit a signal from upstairs to downstairs, possibly struggling to cross between different rings on the house mains.

So far I'm very unimpressed, but I need to learn more about the X10 kit and the way houses are wired in the UK before I make my mind up.

I'm interested to know how much power is wasted by an X10 receiver or transceiver when on standby.

I've been looking for an excuse to play with Inkscape for a while now and Sam suggested I use it to do a circuit diagram we needed to draw.

I found a whole collection of SVG electrical symbols from Wikimedia which made my life a lot easier.

My mind wanders….
Imagine if you added a kind of electronic logic meta data to the XML element which surrounded a group of shapes which represented a component. With some clever scripting you could actually simulate the circuit once you'd drawn it…

Except for uni I have lived in Bourne, Lincolnshire all my life, but my parents have just moved to a bungalow in Colsterworth, just off the A1.

If this picture works, it's my brother cutting the grass, it's also the view outside my new bedroom window. Goodbye Bourne, I miss you.

I've decided what I'd like for my birthday, it's just a black box, a big black box with a computer in it, the size of a shipping container in fact.

That crazy Cringely got it right for once, he just picked the wrong company.

Sun are becoming quite interesting recently, I was very interested in Simon Phipps' talk at LugRadio Live and they're doing interesting things.

In other news…

I got a package in the post today (courtesy of Twisted Lemon) containing some X10 kit to play with and I bought a Nokia 770 the other day, things are finally starting to happen.

I've just set up a wiki farm with MediaWiki for the new hippygeek.co.uk. This means running multiple instances of MediaWiki from a single installation, to reduce the amount of work needed to perform upgrades on multiple wikis.

Basically it involves symlinking the entire contents of the mediawiki directory for each instance, with a few exceptions. I'm not sure how well this will scale if I automate creating wikis in this way and I'm yet to attempt an actual upgrade, I'll write about my experiences here.

If you're looking to do this, I basically followed these instructions with a few modifications, like having a separate database and images directory per wiki.

I also set up cleaner URIs for MediaWiki and disabled anonymous editing for now as spam prevention.

To have one motherboard die is unlucky. To have another die in the same week is downright infuriating.

Dirty power? Faulty power cable? Phase of the moon?

Miffed.

Update: Good news! I just brought one of the motherboards back from the dead. I stripped it down completely and very thoroughly checked it over. Somehow the BIOS had become ever so slightly dislodged.

Happier.

A creatively written article from Wired describes the “Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you'll ever use.”

The article describes Google's search for cheap power for their giant data centres and touches on others like Sun and Ask.com. It raises some interesting new paradigms in computing, such as electrical power being more scarce than processing power and time being more precious than money.

It's perhaps interesting to include a mention of Amazon's own EC2 or “Elastic Compute Cloud” and S3 or “Simple Storage Service” which allow you to pay for remote storage and bandwidth. It's also interesting to note Microsoft's shift towards the new “Live” brand and their move into Software as a Service, all before Vista is even out of the door.

This could all be passed off as just another spin on “the network is the computer”, but things certainly seem to be speeding up around here. You have to wonder whether the concept was just before its time, and now the infrastructure is catching up, the real fun is starting.

An aside…

With all these clouds around, I've created an experimental “tag cloud” of my own. It sits on the right hand side of my homepage and represents the topics I'm currently writing about.