Ben Francis

Currently on my mind…

* A technical paper I’m entering into the IET Write Around the World Competition that one of my lecturers has agreed to proof read (I’m starting to doubt myself and worrying about its actual value).
* Application(s) to Google Summer of Code 2006
* A service idea for Twisted Lemon
…and how all this fits into the big masterplan ‘o doom.

Oh and revision.

I’ve also been thinking about all the geek friends I have like Jon, Sam, J, Tom, Ian, Elliot, Mark, Daniel, Adam, Gary, James – hardly any of whom know each other but who all individually have a great amount of technical skill and are linked only by the fact that I know them. I’ve been trying to imagine what they could all come up with if put in the same room together. It would be something beautifully if chaotically designed which is digital, looks good, sounds good and is ubiquitous in nature. I just have no idea what it would be! Weird.

In other news…

Pluto Home was a big disappointment. (Half of) the idea is there, but it’s lacking a couple of years worth of polish. There are licensing issues too, the “Pluto License” isn’t Libre Free. It gives me hope that I’m still on to something.

If Pluto Home lives up to the claims on the commerical website and “all facts no fluff” techie homepage then it’s really quite exciting and almost exactly what I’ve been looking for/starting to develop myself. The similarities really are quite uncanny.

Pluto Home caters for Security, Home Automation, Entertainment, Telecom and Computing using a single development platform as a wrapper to a lot of very good Open Source software in a distribution based on Debian. It has a central “core” machine and can have a large number of client “appliances” around the home including tablets and symbian mobile phones.

The biggest things I might have done differently are trying to use more web based user interfaces rather than a custom window manager to give compatibility to a larger number of client devices and a slightly different (more idealistic) design philosophy. I’m trying to keep an open mind.

So far I’ve not got the “Kickstart CD” to boot, it freezes with a libc problem, but I will persevere.

I’ve just added a music and news section to my personal web server using Ampache and Gregarius respectively.

Ampache

I’ve rsync’d 8000 songs to the web server (luckily it was sitting next to me on this occasion rather than being the other side of the country) and Ampache is coping very well. I’m using a MySQL backend but Ampache uses id3 meta data so involves no user action other than pointing it at a directory full of mp3 files. I can then create http streams of albums, artists or random selections on the fly and it gives useful information about popular songs, recent additions etc. I’ve disabled the built in authentication mechanism and just placed it in my http authenticated area which has caused some interesting problems for the http streams.

It seems XMMS does not support http authentication on web streams like Windows Media Player and Winamp do. If you provide it a URL of format http://user:password@stream_url it sort of works, but that’s not convenient when the stream URLs are generated on the fly with PHP. What it *should* do is just prompt me for a username and password when they are required. I’ve found out that the latest beta of VLC media player has this functionality but it’s in the early stages and prompts you for a password for every song in an m3u stream.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to keep my music synced between my web server, desktop and iRiver H340.

Gregarius

I was going to use PlanetPlanet to aggregate all my daily news reading because I don’t like the way a lot of web based RSS readers only let you read one channel at a time, I’m used to the merged feeds view on LiveJournal. PlanetPlanet isn’t really designed for this sort of thing though and I soon realised that it wasn’t going to be dynamic enough for my news reading needs. I had a look around and found Gregarius in a deep dark corner of the Internet and I love it! The news can be viewed all merged together, by category/folder/tag or whatever you like.

It has a clean, slick magical-AJAX-ified UI and it’s easy to add new feeds, organise them into folders, categorise them, tag them, whatever. I’m using a MySQL back end again but it also generates such useful things as an OPML file on the fly so the useful data isn’t all locked up in the database.

I’m currently trying to figure out how to subscribe to this OPML file in a desktop client like Mozilla Thunderbird but all it seems to want to do is import from an OPML file, and does it badly.

Access not import

Above I mentioned that I want to subscribe to my list of news feeds, not import it. I have this same problem with a lot of things like calendar and address book applications. Importing implies that this is the only application I will ever use to access my data and if I ever want to use anything else I will have to keep exporting and importing manually. What I really want to do is have one data source and many applications, not have my data locked up in one place. For calendars this means iCalendar and WebDAV or CalDAV and for an address book the best I can think of is LDAP. Separating the data from the application and using open standards to access the data.

I suppose this is Software as a Service type thinking and it’s all part of my big masterplan ‘o doom. Watch this space.

Gallery Software

I’m looking for some decent web based gallery software. I like Gallery2 and Coppermine but neither of them manage albums the way I want them to. They import!

With Ampache I can point it at a directory of mp3 files and let it feast on the data, updating as more songs are added (though this has to be done with an “update” click or a cron job). I want my gallery software to do a similar thing – look at the directory stucture and create its albums from that. It’s fine to cache a load of thumbnails and a cache of certain data, but I don’t want to have to keep importing new “albums”.

OpenWengo

I’ve been looking for a decent VOIP client for some time so I can stop using Skype and start using open standards. Google Talk almost has me convinced but it’s not quite open enough yet and The Gizmo Project is closed source.

Enter OpenWengo – built by a load of French guys. I’ve not had chance to play yet but it looks promising.

I just have to sort out in my mind where all these bits and bobs like OpenWengo, Asterix, Call Out, Call In and mobile devices are going to fit together. The world of VoIP is pretty complex. I also want to bundle instant messaging with my VoIP somehow… and then there’s the issue of video confrencing.

More subversion and trac

Next up, I want to start using subversion and trac for *all* the code I write. I was so impressed when using them for our rover project that I want to start using them for all the C and PHP etc. I write. Having multiple projects means playing around with SvnParentPath and TracEnvParentDir. I want an installation on tralk for my personal work and an installation elsewhere for Twisted Lemon work.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar finally launched today, that’s another tick on the predictions list.

At first glance I don’t like the scroll bar on the calendar but I love the quick add field and am impressed by their support for iCalendar files – you can subscribe and publish as well as import and export!

Another neat feature is to send a reminder to your mobile phone though I doubt if this will work in the UK.

They do of course have very good search for events, the interface is reasonably slick and the design is very clean. I’ve not yet figured out how good the integration with GMail is.

I made a very brief comment on a previous post that said “X3D + AJAX = …I wonder”.

This was a simplistic first thought about a converged online 3D world, a 3D extension of the web. A website, but with X3D instead of XHTML. In fact, I think that a single web “site” should be available in both, but that’s a different discussion about sick uses of XSLT.

I first got interested in Second Life when I heard about the open source side of their development on LUGRadio. I set up an account but couldn’t play it because my hardware wasn’t good enough. Now I’ve just been watching a Google Techtalk Video on SecondLife and I’m even more interested. It really is an amazingly complex online world where people “write” objects in code and even make real money. I can’t help but make a parallel here with The Matrix. This is voluntary habitation of a world which is purely virtual but shares an awful lot of properties of the real world with a complex physics engine and social organisations, currency etc. And it’s huge!

I also know about another project called Open Croquet and it all got me thinking. Why are all these online worlds separate? Shouldn’t the online world be as much a unified thing as the web? Why can’t you just pop your WoW avatar into SecondLife? Not that I currently have either.

When I first heard about people buying “Real Estate” in SecondLife I couldn’t believe people were actually paying *real* money for *virtual* land which can be copied for virtually no cost, I really couldn’t comprehend why anyone would do that. But watching the Tech Talk I’ve realised that isn’t actually that insane. The entire simulation of SecondLife exists on servers, the client is very thin indeed. What you’re actually paying is a hosting fee, you’re paying for them to rack mount and maintain a server!

When they add land to the SecondLife world they literally just add a new server and have code which connects the edges together. Lindon Labs who make SecondLife have talked about Open Sourcing their code. What if *anyone* could host their own land on their own server in a unified 3D online world and registering it’s location in that world was just like registering a domain name with DNS? What if the web was 3D?

After thinking this, an article popped up on Wired suggesting that perhaps all of these separate worlds are just a transitional stage and eventually we will have a unified 3D world on the Internet. Exactly what I’m thinking 🙂

Of course there are massive technical challenges here in allowing the distributed and decentralised hosting of an online world and lots of open standards to work on. The SecondLife online world is transferred to the client by a complex combination of vectors, textures, sound etc. and all of these need to seamlessly interoperate. There are huge social and legal issues touched upon in the Techtalk to think about too.

I’m just pleased that the people in SecondLife and the people in OpenCroquet are the right kind of people to be building this unified online world, I just hope that they don’t keep SecondLife tucked away on their own servers forever as a propriatory solution. We don’t want one company playing God in the virtual world.

Octomatics is an alternative number system which its inventors claim has a lot of advantages over the decimal system.

I like the idea.

Back in October I made some predictions about technology. Most were quite obvious but I’m impressed how many have come true.

Already there:
* iPod Video People suspect the “real” iPod video is yet to come and it might even be a lot like the next prediction
* Handheld device which is basically just a lot of storage and a big display with approximately one button and *lots* of connectivity Just need Apple or Nokia or someone to make it look prettier now.

Very nearly there:
* Google Calendar
* the death of 3G by 2009

Not there yet, though there’s plenty of work in this direction:
* a replacement for the traditional office suite

In other news…
I have C programming coming out of my ears, assembler programming and psychology reports to do and the perpetual webmasterness continues. I’ve now done two sets at an acoustic night, I sleep for about 4 hours a night and my pile of washing is taking over my room.

Twisted Lemon now has a website, albeit a temporary one until we do a better template design.

lauperr seems to be changing (in a very good way) and if I had a spare second to think about it I’d probably say I’m enjoying life a great deal 😛

Music Chief for Yahoo! had the guts to tell the music industry what they don’t want to hear but everyone knows is true. DRM is holding back digital music.

I pay roughly £5 a month for a subscription to eMusic because they give me DRM-free mp3s. Give the customers what they want – DRM isn’t a required part of business models for music downloads. Fact.