Monday, November 28, 2005

London Perl Workshop '05

Not exactly "in transit", more a round trip. On Saturday morning I got up at 4.30am and made my way to Exeter St. Davids to get the first train of the day out of the South West to London so that I could got to the second annual London Perl Workshop run by the London.pm crowd. Almost predictably the train was delayed by an hour, so I arrived harried, rushed, and late, into City University and slipped into the back of the first talk of the day.


Found the building...

I get the impression that the organisers might have been short of talks to put on the Advanced track. Maybe I should have done my bit and submitted a talk abstract after all? I actually came up with a couple of ideas on the train up to London, although it was a bit late at that point I suppose...

The workshop had a different feeling about it than last year. Unlike last year the Learning and Advanced Perl tracks weren't scheduled so that the talks started and ended at the same time, and this meant that there was a lot less movement of people between the two tracks. There were several talks on the Learning Perl track that I would have quite liked to see, but I couldn't drop out of the Advanced track because of the schedule mismatch. I think it gave the workshop a much less friendly feel.


Abigail talking about Regexp::Common

The Advanced track in the morning may as well have been re-named the Abigail track, and to be honest I found his delivery fairly dry, although perhaps it was simply his choice of material which would have been fairly heavy going for the best of speakers. I arrived about half way through his talk on Rgexp::Common, which didn't hold much interest for me, although his talk later on on Lexical Attributes was more intriguing. Admittedly I disagree with a lot of what he said about the Perl object model, but that's neither here nor there...


Jonathon Worthington talking about Parrot

I was looking forward to Jos Boumans' talk on "Barely Legal XXX Perl", diversions into Perl sickness, but Jos didn't turn up having phoned in sick, claiming flu, despite having been in the pub the night before till one in the morning. Which left the highlight of the morning, at least for me, as Jonathon Worthington's talk on the state of the Parrot virtual machine, and it is to Jonathon that the quote of the day award has to go, for,
JIT, stands for "Just In Time" compilation, a lot like the organisation of this conference...
to which Simon Wistow replied,
Harsh, but essentially fair...
Facilities at the new venue weren't a patch on last year, which was held in the Imperial College Union, and lunch turned out to be a fairly dismal affair where I was charged £6.00 for a sandwich and a fairly small "large" cup of coffee.


Jonathon Chin talking about OpenGL

However the workshop picked up dramatically for me after lunch, with Jonathon Chin talking about using the OpenGL API from Perl, and his OpenGL::Simple module, which was a lively introduction into 3d graphics in Perl which has moved on a lot since last time I dipped my toes into it...


Leon and Leo talking about mighTyV.com

Following Jonathon's talk I decided to switch tracks, catching the last few minutes of Dave Cross' talk on database access with Perl, before Leon Brocard and Leo Lapworth's talk on mighTyV.com, their award winning site, which shows exactly what you can do with Perl, Catalyst and, of course, CPAN, in a fairly short stretch of time.


Mark-Jason Dominus talking about, well, Perl...

The closing talk of the day was by Mark-Jason Dominus on Perl red flags. It turned out that I'd heard a good deal of the material before at OSCON, so I was a bit disappointed, I was hoping he would talk about some of the topics covered in his new book "Higher Order Perl", but I guess I understand that the organisers wanted material that would appeal to everyone.

In the end Mark-Jason over ran by about half and hour, so I had to sneak out of this talk just before six so I could make my way across London and catch the last train of the day back to Exeter. Which was easier said than done with the Circle Line closed...

Overall it was a good day, although a very long one for me since I didn't make it back into Exeter till well past 11.00pm. However I didn't enjoy the workshop as much as I did last years, which I think was a combination of both the material persented and the venue. That said, I'll be at the front of the line to sign up for next years workshop if they run another, and I'll even offer to speak next year, promise...

Update: So more on this years London Perl Workshop from Dominic Mitchell and Ben Metcalfe...

Update: Leo and Leon have just released the source code for Braga, the platform behind mighTyV.com, how cool is that?

Update: Most of the slides from the talks have now been posted onto the workshop site...

Thursday, November 24, 2005

UK space effort underfunded

The BBC is reporting that the UK space effort is 'starved of cash', and in other news, new research shows that water is 'wet'...

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

No hard drive, means instant on...

Apple's latest latest deal with Samsung has led to the comany being investigated by the Korean government. However it has also started the rumour mill going at full tilt that the next generation of Intel iMacs won't have a hard disk at all and we're looking at zero boot time computers.

But personally I'm with Fabienne Serriere, and I'm hoping for a updated Newton-like palmtop. I'll settle for a zero boot time iMac though...

Update: More from Macslash...

5p off a litre?

Fancy 5p off a litre of unleaded? That'd be 35 cents a US gallon for my American readers, although for once you're not included in things...

Following the recent petrol protests here in the UK, the price of petrol has fallen from a peak of over £1 per litre (around US$7.00 per US gallon) to a bit more reasonable 86.9p per litre (around US$6.00 per US gallon)

However Ben Scammell, a veteran campaigner for cheaper fuel, isn't alone in thinking that this is still a bit on the high side. However, unlike the rest of us he's actually set out to do something about the problem. His idea is that car drivers should club together and negotiate a bulk-buying discount from petrol stations in a similar way to the bigger companies. He has established a website and says he has used his contacts in the industry to negotiate an "in principle" deal with a national fuel retailer.

He says the petrol company, which he won't as yet name, has promised to provide a discount of between 5p and 10p per litre of fuel to everyone who signs up to the website provided the number of registrations reaches a certain level.

Worth a try perhaps?

Monday, November 21, 2005

The iBone

Stephen Taylor has written a How To (via TUAW) which shows you how to hack together a bluetooth headset, a mobile phone and an iPod so that the audio from the iPod runs through the headset. Now, when a call comes through, he pauses the iPod and begins talking. An excellent hack, with intriguing possibilities...

CREDIT: Stephen Taylor (slarti@tpg.com.au)
The iBone

Oh, and for the Yanks in audience, the name presumably comes from the phrase "the dog and bone" which is Cockney rhyming slang for telephone...

AJAX, democracy and users

Paul Graham's latest essay is on the Web 2.0 meme, and despite a rocky start...
Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don't need it. -- Paul Graham
...in the end Paul decides that Web 2.0 is all about; Ajax, democracy, and not maltreating users. But what do these things have in common?
I didn't realize they had anything in common till recently, which is one of the reasons I disliked the term "Web 2.0" so much... Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used. The "trends" we're seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble. -- Paul Graham
Which makes sense. The top down model, imposed almost overnight onto the web by the dot-com boom was an antithesis to anything that had gone before, and I've complained before about the evilness of this...

However Richard MacManus responds arguing that this is the point rest of us have been making for while, which you have to admit is a fair point, although it's good to see someone with Paul's profile getting on the band wagon with us little guys...

Following up a different thread, Ajaxian.com picks on the Paul's arguements about rapid devlepment,
...the new generation of software is being written way too fast for Microsoft even to channel it, let alone write their own in house. Their only hope now is to buy all the best Ajax startups before Google does. -- Paul Graham
and this is something that I definitely can sympathise with, it's doubful that Microsoft can control the emerging Web 2.0 phenomenon due to the rapid pace of development. It's almost sad seeing them trying, because they just don't seem to get it...

The search engine experiment

The Search Engine Experiment (via Ajaxian.com) is an interesting idea, it does parallel searches on the three major engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) and presents the top results to you as brands X, Y and Z. You then get to vote to say which of the anonymous brands actually returned the most relevant result. Without, of course, knowing which results belong to which engine...


The current results (updated every 15 minutes)

Update: More from Inside Google...

Friday, November 18, 2005

Front Row update broken?

Apple has just released an update for FrontRow, the media software which ships with the new iMac G5. But the update seems slightly picky about which iMacs it's going to let itself be installed onto. Despite owning a nice shiny new iMac, the update doesn't show up in Software Update for me, and when I downloaded it manually it won't install.


I don't think so...

I'm running Mac OS X Server 10.4.3 on my iMac, and I'm wondering whether it's the revision number, or the fact that I'm running Server, that means that I can't install the update. Anyone got any ideas?

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Building mobile AJAX with OS X

I didn't realise what the Opera Platform SDK was really all about until I read Russell Beattie's post on the release. I immediately dived into the documentation, and so long as you know a smattering of AJAX, Javascript, CSS, XHTML and XML this looks like the easiest way yet of developing high level mobile applications I've yet come across. Yes, although the bindings to the underlying mobile infrastructure aren't as mature, it's even easier to use that Python for Series 60, at least for applications with graphical interfaces...

The demo application included with the SDK shows exactly what can be done with these new technologies, and it looks impressive.

 
The Opera Mobile Platform in action...

Of course, being me, the first thing I tried to figure out how to develop under Mac OS X. It looks like the only tool from the Symbian SDK you need is the makesis application, which compiles just fine under Mac OS X,

  wget http://symbianos.org/~andreh/makesis-2.0.0.tar.gz
  tar -xvzf makesis-2.0.0.tar.gz
  cd makesis-2.0.0
  make
  make regtest


...and since Opera provide a copy of their Platform-enabled browser for Mac OS X, so you can test your applications on your desktop machine before using bluetooth to deploy them onto your mobile device, it looks like cross-platform development under Mac OS X is pretty well supported.

Update: Opera are hosting a forum for discussion of their mobile platform. Not much content there yet, but it does look like a couple of people from the development team are reading it, so it could turn into a good resource.

Update: A lightning update for the Application Framework...

Update: More from Ajaxian.com on AJAX on a Pocket PC...

Apple shipping universal binaries

It looks like Apple may indeed be ramping up for a January rollout of Intel based hardware after all, as yesterdays release of J2SE 5.0 appears to be a Universal Binary package (via the Apple Blog). Interestingly, there doesn't appear to be any indication in the release notes this is the case, which I'm sure will fuel the rumour mill...

Update: Blogging the keynote live, looks like we're going to get our Intel Macs...

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Google Analytics

I'm usually more up to speed with this stuff, but I've been distracted lately, so I missed the launch of Google's new toy, Google Analytics, until Brad pointed it out to me...

I currently use StatCounter and MyBlogLog for tracking traffic, both on this site and on others I manage for work, along with FeedBurner to provide my RSS feed and the tracking statistics for the feed. It a good solution, and it works well for me, and the amount of information i have about you guys reading this is fairly scary...

But Analytics is supposed to be better [1, 2], although fairly resource heavy, downloading a 17k JavaScript with every page. Amongst others, Tim Bray is doing a limited rollout, and like many is having a few problems. I'm also experimenting with Analytics, and as you'd expect I'm experiencing a few teething problems with the service. We'll see how it goes...

Of course it's fairly simple to avoid being tracked (via Digg) by services like Analytics so for the truly paranoid out there, the message sort of has to be, "Don't Panic".

Talk schedule for LPW 2005

Following up on the CFP, the provisional talk schedule for the London Perl Workshop 2005 has just been published. In the end I decided not to give a talk, mainly because I was too lazy to think of a really good idea, so it's okay, it's safe to sign up if you haven't already done so...

Update: All over now, and a good time was had by all!

Mactel by Christmas?

Well, almost...

Apple Insider is confidently predicting new Intel Macs at Macworld in January. Other people are more sceptical, the Unofficial Apple Weblog is even holding a reader poll. Presumably because they're being honest about that fact that they, along with everyone else, haven't a clue what's going on, despite the rumours spreading almost out of control over the blogosphere. So, new Intel Macs by Christmas? Nope.. by January? Maybe, but I wouldn't lay money on it...

That said, Apple is on a marketing roll right now, and they probably don't want to rock the boat too much. Everyone is expecting a a big hardware rollout. I mean, it's Macworld, in San Francisco, with Steve Jobs giving a keynote. They have to give the press something. Right?

Update: Now the rumours are not only of Intel based Macs, but that and a price cut on top...

Update: The Unofficial Apple Weblog have an interesting angle on the rumours, they're arguing that the rumours of Intel based Macs are actually being spread by Apple themselves in an attempt to overcome the Osbourne Effect. It actually makes a twisted sort of logical sense in a conspiracy theory gone mad sort of way...

Update: Blogging the keynote live, looks like we're going to get our Intel Macs after all...

What is Web 2.0?

The guys at del.icio.us have used the power of Web 2.0 to find that Web 2.0 is actually all about aruging about what Web 2.0 means. Well, I for one am glad we sorted all that out...

Making license plates

I have half a dozen bad ideas a day, but every once in a while I get a good idea. An idea that could probably make me a bunch of money if I'd actually sat down and wrote some software. But when it comes down to it, I'm pretty lazy...

But some of the ideas are pretty fun, and I usually write some tinkertoy examples that proved, at least to my own satisfaction, that if I put in a whole bunch of effort I could probably make it all work, but as I mentioned before, I'm pretty lazy. I'm bad at making license plates,
With any job, there's some creative work that needs to be done - new technology to be developed or whatever. Everything else - ninety-nine percent of it - is making deals, raising capital, going to meetings, marketing and sales. We call that stuff making license plates... -- Neal Stephenson, in Cryptonomicon
After hearing him speak at OSCON 2004, Paul Graham became one of may favourite dispensors of wisdom. Paul is pretty good at making license plates, at least he's good enough that he made a bunch of money doing it, although it's interesting to see that like a lot of people who aren't really business men, once he made enough license plates to not have to worry about money every again, he stopped doing it. That probably tells me all I need to know, if I didn't already know enough, about making license plates...

However over the last couple of years Paul has started to think about start ups and venture capital. This almost certainly has nothing to do with making license plates, and everything to do with the fact that he'll now see lots of cool tinkertoy level ideas from smart people before anyone else. The fact that he might be able to persuade some people to make enough license plates so they can stop worrying about money as well is probably incidental. Paul is more interested in hackers than license plates,
If it is possible to make yourself into a great hacker, the way to do it may be to make the following deal with yourself: you never have to work on boring projects... -- Paul Graham, in Great Hackers
The boring bit about being an academic is writing things up. After all, you've already done the research and proved whatever it was you wanted to figure out. In programming terms, you've scratched the itch already, but unlike programming the thing you did to scratch the itch isn't usually releasable as is, this is painful and usually leads to making license plates to justify your existence.

What's the solution to this problem? I think they're usually called graduate students, although depressingly the further you progress as an academic, the less cool stuff you get to do, and the more administration and teaching ends up on your plate. The real problem with academia is that the system forces the smart people, the great hackers, to make license plates. That isn't really a good idea.

Fortunately for me, I'm still working on fun stuff [1, 2]. Although this means I probably haven't progressed very far in the academic food chain, it does mean I'm having a good time. So what happens when I stop having fun? I'll probably have to sit down and make enough license plates so I don't have to worry about that stuff again...

Update: Russell Beattie's thoughts [1, 2] on startups...

Update: Paul Graham on how to fund a startup. If you're thinking about going the startup route and you haven't read this article, then I think your're an idiot...

g95, actually quite cool...

A colleague of mine has been porting some code from Linux on Intel to Mac OS X on Power PC and he ran into endian problems. The solution to this normally involves writing a whole bunch of tedious byte swapping code, but it appears that one of the things that the new(ish) g95 Fortran compiler does is allow you to configure endianness at runtime using an environment variable,
% setenv G95_ENDIAN big
which is actually quite a cool thing to be able to do, although since the byte swapping code is going to be compiled into every single executable you have to wonder what sort of overhead this not commonly used feature is adding...

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Is Google Print fair use?

With Google Print finally live the debate about whether the service is fair use or actually infringes international copyright law has begun again in earnest...


Google Print goes live amidst controversy...

Forbes calls the initiative "Google's Stumble" (via the Unofficial Google Weblog), while the Motley Fool has an even more stark warning for Google's executives, claiming that the new Amazon Pages programme, where you pay-per-page will be the winning business model. Now that's a scary thought...

Update: So is Google Print really all about Google's book rental business?

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Slashdot loosing it?

Is Digg going to be the Web 2.0 replacement for Slashdot? Every geek has a special place in their heart for Slashdot, but despite this we all moan about how it has been going down hill over the last few years, and the moaning has grown quite stringent over the last few months.

But looking at the Alexa traffic rankings for digg.com vs. slashdot.org (via Waxy) in just under a year Digg has reached near-Slashdot traffic levels.

What's the difference? With Digg, users submit stories for review just like Slashdot, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do, and maybe that's all that was needed...

Update: I sort of agree with one of the remarks that turned up in the Digg comments on this story,
... I still prefer reading Slashdot's comments to Digg's comments on the same story - Digg may have the stories first, but Slashdot is where people intelligently discuss it.
although the quality of the comments on Slashdot is more than variable, this guy has a point...

Update: Of course Digg is sitting in a precarious position at the moment, Slashdot is beloved, if aging. If someone esle, perhaps Newsvine, comes along with a better site and a better concept, they'll get marginalised. Whatever the outcome however, I think the battle for the Web 2.0 era Slashdot replacement is turely begun...

Update: Russell Beattie has his own opinion on Newsvine and Web 2.0. Russell started off as a mainstream journalist, so he has an interesting take on things...

Update: There is an interesing interview in Information Week with Jeff Bate, who co-founded Slashdot with Rob Malda. Ironically perhaps, I found the interview via Digg...

Update: Some really interesting numbers and graphs from Jason Kottke comparing the effect of a Digg link to one from Slashdot for a recent post to his blog.

Lift-off for Venus Express

Amongst others, both the BBC an MSNBC are reporting on the successful launch of ESA's Venus Express spacecraft from Baikonur at 03:33 UT this morning.

CREDIT: ESA/Starsem
The launch of the Soyuz-Fregat rocket carrying Venus Express.

Unlike the American space programme the Russians seem to accept that failure is something that is sometimes going to happen when you launch spacecraft, the Americans almost seem to take it as a personal insult, and assume it has to be someone's fault. However there has been a string of launch failures for the Russian programme recently, not least the loss of Cosmos-1 and Cryosat, so it's good to see things going right for them again...

Update: Slashdot and The Register have more...

Update: The Venus Express post-launch summary from ESA.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Ubiquitous bluetooth

Nerd Vittles (via Engadget) is currently running a "How To" series (Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3) on automatic call transfer by implementing proximity detection using Bluetooth and Asterisk, the open source PBX. Next up they're going to show us how to tie the system into the home automation server they built earlier using a Mac mini and the Indigo home control software. This is great stuff, and it's shocking how little money these guys are spending to achieve it...

Apple rumours

Apple rumours in the lead up to Macworld in January are two a penny, ranging from the merely unlikely to truly bizarre. Amidst the tumult Apple Matters asks, "What do you want out of Intel based Mac laptops?". It's a good question, even if asked in a tongue and cheek manner...

What would I like to see? A wide-screen, slim line, light weight, version of the 12" Powerbook with a multiple mouse button trackpad, since they've already done that with the Mighty Mouse.

More interestingly perhaps, since the Powerbooks already come with WiFi and Bluetooth. Why not GSM, or better yet, 3G connectivity as well? They could sell it as having a "connection everywhere", and it'd blow most current smart handsets out of the water. Apple could even think of it as a practice run for building a proper iPhone, rather than the horror of the Motorola ROKR.

Of course, we're all still waiting for our Bluetooth or WiFi enabled iPods, and a Bluetooth version of the Mighty Mouse, amongst other things...

Update: Blogging the January Macworld keynote live...

No more science?

Slashdot are reporting that NASA has cancelled any further scientific research aboard the ISS until further notice. Which sort of begs the question, if not science, what is it for..?

Aardvark'd

For those of you following Project Aardvark (aka Frog Creek Copilot), Joel Spolsky talks about the documentary made about the project by Lerone Wilson. There aren't that many geek orientated documentaries, so I'm actually sort of looking forward to seeing this one...

From the trailer for "Aardvark'd: 12 weeks with geeks"...

Update: Marc Hedlund has posted a, fairly critical, review of the movie on the O'Reilly Radar site...

International man of mystery?

The Times is reporting on the unusual case of the man who has lived for 22 years as the Earl of Buckingham, a title which became extinct in 1687. In 1983 the man, whose real name is still not known, assumed the false identity of Christopher Edward, Earl of Buckingham. Curiously, despite his elaborate charade, he seems to have led an unremarkable life working as a IT security consultant for a Swiss insurance firm since 2001. The man faces jail today for fraudulently obtaining a passport, but still refuses to reveal his true identity.

Update: He was sent down for 21 months...

My folder of shame

Matt Jones seems to have been the first to ask, "What's in your folder of shame?" Which may prompt you to ask, what's a folder of shame?
The things where you've just thought of the title, but written nothing to back it up? The momentary points of self-deluded genius that in the cold light of day you thought better of?
This is one of those runaway memes that seem to have hit a nerve with many bloggers [1, 2, 3]. I guess it's because we all have a bunch of half completed posts sitting around, almost ready, if only we could find a spark of inspiration to finish them, or in a lot of cases, the time. So, what's currently in my drafts folder?
  • Front Row first impressions
  • Search as a commodity?
  • Google Local goes mobile
  • Long awaited laptop upgrades
  • Counting Heads
  • Those that don't know history
  • Is the U.S. anti-science?
  • Google, beyond evil?
  • Broken feeds?
  • Intelligent photo tagging
  • Beattie on startups...
  • In search of a better laptop
Some of these are good stuff, almost completed posts. Some of these won't ever seen the light of day... what's in your folder of shame?

Browseback

I've just come across the first application which meant that I wished I was running Tiger on my Powerbook rather than Panther, it might finally be time to upgrade...


Browseback running on my iMac server

Browseback (via TUAW), which looks like it'll prove to be a lot more useful than Dashboard for day to day use, visually displays your browser history and is pretty much a killer application for someone who spends as much time tied into a browser as I do...

This sort of thing, along with exposé for tabbed browsing, is what Apple themselves should be doing with Safari. These are the sort of usability features that blow the socks off other browers, so why doesn't Safari have them?

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Announcing, OSCON 2006...

It looks like O'Reilly have just announced the dates for OSCON 2006, which will be held in Portland in Oregon again next year. Leave a hole in your diary folks...

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Al Jazeera and Fireman Sam?

Apparently Al Jazeera has just bought the rights to broadcast the S4C children's programme Fireman Sam for their newly launched children's channel. Somehow this struck me as so odd as to be news worthy, it just doesn't sit well with their image of a hard hitting independent news station. I guess this means that Fireman Sam now comes in English, Welsh and Arabic..?