Tag: technology

All those fed up of hearing about Google, look away now.

In the Google Newsletter today were a few useful tools I didn’t know existed.

• Co-op – Another way of getting users to help organise the world’s information
• Notebook – Basically a wiki for Joe Public, you can have private or public notes. The intereting bit is “AJAX” UI for inline WYSIWYG editing, pretty much exactly what I meant by my WizziWiki idea on my ideas wiki.
• Trends – An incredibly useful tool (for some people) for graphing search trends on just about anything – kind of a build-your-own zeitgeist. For example, Good vs. Evil

.mobi

The .mobi TLD was launched on Monday. This is good because it is promoting the (currently struggling) mobile web, but bad because I think it’s the wrong direction. Why have separate domains for the mobile web than for the desktop web? We shouldn’t be making assumptions about how people are accessing our web pages. I think that web pages should be in a device independent language which can be transformed to be rendered in different formats (see previous post). It’s an issue of properly separating content and presentation, not of marketing.

Homebrew Mobile Phone Club

Following in a similar theme, I recently discovered the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club who work on open mobile platforms (with, I think, the ultimate goal of creating their own mobile phones.) They share the frustration that I have for the current range of available mobile phones. My frustration is that I know exactly what I phone I want, it just hasn’t been invented yet!

Gumstix

And to finish off, take a look at these awesome little Linux computers, the size of a stick of chewing gum.
Gumstix. There is lots of development support and a range of expansion kits.

DIAL

Thanks to an anonymous poster for pointing me towards the first public release of a working draft for the W3C’s Device Independent Authoring Language. This was released by the Device Independence Working Group four days ago.

DIAL may possibly be the UIDL (User Interface Description Language) I’ve been looking for. It does seem to be quite content focussed rather that UI focussed like something like UIML, but it might do the job. Being W3C recommendation will be a huge bonus. It is based on elements from existing xml formats like XHTML(2) but also XForms, which has some very interesting features. (see the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (not W3C) for an alternative take.)

RFC: Device Independent Web Server

Suggestion:

Each web “page” is stored on the server as a DIAL document. A page is requested by its name and a client-specified extension (e.g. .xhtml, .svg, .x3d, .voicexml, .xul), usually with an HTTP GET. The server first performs any server-side scripting, then performs a server-side transformation on the output using XSLT with an XSL stylesheet to return a document in that format. If a stylesheet for the requested extension does not exist, a .dial document is passed to the client which can attempt to perform a client-side transformation or return an error.

Questions:

Could this same DIAL document also be bound/translated/tranformed into a GTK or similar user interface using something other than XSLT?

Could an XMLHTTPRequest type request be sent to the server and the server return a fragment which is either pre-transformed on the server or transformed on the client into a suitable format?

Is this RESTful?

DISCLAIMER: I have been drinking whisky

The Google Web Toolkit allows you to write an application in Java and “compile” it to “AJAX”.

This is cool because it means that you could use Eclipse to develop these sorts of applications and not have to worry about the ridiculous variations in web browsers. Whilst insanely useful (and interesting to know how GMail and Google Calendar were written!) this does still feel like a bit of a hack to me.

It all feels like a stop-gap solution to a bigger problem which is using the web as a platform for applications as well as webpages. The ideal solution would be a standard which all browsers actually follow for asynchronous communication with a server and a new markup language for user interfaces other than HTML, sort of like XUL but more generic like UIML. I guess the problem is that these things take time, lots of time.

I’ve mentioned before the need for a very generic User Interface Description Language (UIDL) which can be transported over networks and mapped/bound/transformed into various different graphical environments on the fly – ranging from a web browser to GTK to a physical device with buttons and LEDs!

May the ranking commence.

Update: 6297 applications

I’ve just been disconnected from my university Internet Connection (and should have been banned for three days until someone from my department talked them round) for using Bittorrent.

Sorry LUGRadio, I’ll be leeching off your bandwidth from now on, it seems Bittorrent is outlawed. I’ve had my bandwidth restrictions “raised” to 750Mb of bandwidth a day up and down inclusive (bearing in mind this is a 32Mb Line), so it looks like I won’t be downloading any Linux distributions for a while either.

Argh. Let’s just hope they don’t find out I’m using a router as a firewall and spoofing my MAC address, another thing that’s banned under our terms and conditions.

An article on NewsForge describes the frustration of the Free Software Foundation with trying to put across their opinion on “Digital Rights Management” when the argument has been “framed” by the very name given to the technology. They are trying to think of a suitable alternative phrase to describe it.

How about “Digital Rights Restrictions”? Possibly not perfect.

I’ve said before that I believe Digital Rights Management is futile because it’s fundamentally flawed. I think Copyright and Patent law need seriously revising to be relevent to today’s technology. Their original purpose of promoting innovation and creativity is no longer being served. Efforts like Creative Commons are a step in the right direction.

Is it me or is there no standard way of embedding video in a web page without specifying a player? Surely you should be able to embed video just like

myvideo.mpg

(with pointy brackets) and let the browser decide what to do with it?

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.