iUI and developing for the iPhone
Recent developments mean that it might become less relevant, but I must admit to being pretty impressed with Joe Hewitt's iUI web development framework for the iPhone...
Joe Hewitt talking about iUI
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Joe Hewitt talking about iUI
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Heading home from OSCON
So I'm sitting in the lounge at PDX waiting for my flight to Chicago O'Hare and then onward to Heathrow. However I'm not entirely sure how far I'm going to get after I land back in the Britain. Looking at the news coming out of the UK the rail system doesn't look like its recovered from the heavy flooding last week while I was travelling to OSCON.
The BBC's flood mashup (via Google Lat Long Blog) looks a bit worrying as well. To get from London to Exeter I have to go through Reading, which doesn't seem to be in a good way right now, and with more rain predicted while I'm enroute to Heathrow I'm pretty much reduced to crossing my fingers at this point...
Update: Made it home in one piece, with the trains more or less running to time, unless you wanted to head north out of Paddington towards Oxford. In which case you were out of luck as the lines were still underwater. Although looking at the countryside as I passed through Berkshire, the best description I can come up with is "water-logged". It probably wouldn't put much more rain to start another round of flooding...
Friday, July 27, 2007
OSCON: Final keynote
The final keynote, and last session of the 2007 Open Source Convention is on Open Source Hardware and it's being given by Philip Torrone, the senior editor of Make: Magazine and Limor Fried who is according to Nat is the only person making money out of open source hardware right now.
Nat Torkington at his last OSCON
We're kicking off with Nat talking about next year, this is his last year working on OSCON, he's been doing this for eleven years and we're going to miss him. Although possibly not his shirts...
Philip and Limor are talking about open hardware
Update: On to the keynote talk and Philip and Limor are talking about open hardware, and how the field is starting to take off...
The Make: Board
interestingly it looks like people are starting to introduce new licences, the Chumby HDK License and the TAPR Open Hardware License because unlike software hardware is mostly based on patents, not copyright, and different licenses may be better.
Update: They've moved on to talking about Fab@Home, which is pretty cool, because once you've built one of these they can actually self-fabricate and duplicate themselves...
Update: Okay, I desperately need this, they're talking about Botanicalls which allows plants to place phone calls for human help, for instance when they need watering...
Botanicalls, plants that ask for help...
Update: They've moved on to talking about WaveBubble an open source RF jammer, which is certainly illegal to sell, and probably illegal to use, but probably not illegal to self-build.
Update: ...and we're done.
Update: Philip and Limor's keynote is now on blip.tv, and the slides are available for download.
OSCON: OSS Amateur Robotics
Next up is Amateur Robotics given by Mark Gross from Intel.
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| CREDIT: Mark Gross |
Update: He's talking about the on-board computing system for the robot, which is running a hacked NSLU2, which is pretty cool, as I've got one of those kicking around somewhere.
Unlike the previous talk, which was at about my level of hands-on with hardware, this stuff is well beyond my level of competence. I'm a software guy with delusions of grandeur, but I know my limits...
Update: More on the NSLU2-Linux and the Open Embedded projects.
Update: His slides are available, although they're in Open Office format, which isn't amazingly useful. But there is a lot more information on his website.
OSCON: Hack the Real World
I'm in Hack the Real World with Open Source and Microcontrollers given by Brian Jepson from Make: Magazine.
Brian Jepson talking about hacking the real world
He's talking about the Make Controller Kit and Arduino boards, and despite being from Make: he's focusing on the Arduino boards because it's "super open". The main difference is that the Arduino doesn't have an operating system, unlike the Make: board, and it's "...a lot like the old days".
Update: He's talking about the different types of 'serial', and just mentioned the MAX232 chip which does conversion between RS-232 and TTL serial.
Update: He's talking about the Parallax RFID module which is a great module, cheap, and the pins plug right into a breadboard.
Update: This is pretty cool, he's pushing through some code examples of how to use the Parallax RFID module with the Arduino board, which apparently come from Making Things Talk (via amazon.com) by Tom Igoe.
Update: He's talking about a bunch of different sensors, including the pretty interesting volatile organic compounds sensor from FigaroSensor.com. Also interesting is force sensing resistors from Trossen Robotics.
Update: He's also talking about a Serial to Wi-Fi widget, with a simple telenet level interface, about US$90 from SemiConductorsStore.com.
Update: There is also a GSM module, with embedded Python, for US$150 from SparkFun.com, and a GPS module for US$70 from Parallax.com.
Update: Apparently Brad was sitting somewhere in the back.
OSCON: Friday Morning Keynote
The Friday morning keynote kicked off with Philip Rosedale the CEO of Linden Lab, who is here to convince us to go to work on their newly open sourced second life client. He's doing a demo of the new first look viewer with the inbuilt voice client, and oddly he's doing a slide presentation inside Second Life, which is displayed on the projector instead of "real" powerpoint. Which is a bit bizarre...
Philip is arguing that Second Life has to, like the Internet become profoundly open. They're going to open source their server software and allow people to run and host their own server, and they've already open sourced their client.
Update: Philip is talking about the Second Life in a web browser client that turned up on the Teen Grid a few weeks ago...
Update: Next up is Jimmy Wales one of the founders of Wikipedia, who is talking about his new project Wikia. Which, cutting through the hyperbole, looks like a site where you can set up and host your own wiki. He's talking about trying to open source search, and Wikia Search, which he's referring to as the LAMP stack for search. Which is fine as far as it goes, but who's going to pay for the hardware? I think Tim O'Reilly even talked about this earlier in the week, even if you had Google's software, you couldn't rebuild Google's service because you don't have their hardware or their back end distributed database.
One of the thing about modern cryptography is that nobody actually breaks codes anymore, they just prove that in theory it's vulnerable to certain attacks. As far as I can see Jimmy is basically pushing the same sort of agenda here, theoretical search. If we have a billion dollar data centre, we could build a search service?
Update: Interesting, they've just acquired Grub, a distributed crawling service. Oh, that's not useful, the Grub client is Windows only...
Update: The next speaker is Simon Wardley from Fotango, who spent some time apologising for his Britishness, before kicking off and talking about the commoditisation of software.
In the 1800's... electricity engineers were the Spice Girls of their time
Update: You have to give the man credit for mentioning Yak shaving. He's talking about open source standards and providing competitive utility market at all levels of the stack,
...it's not good for the planet, and that annoys me because it's not good for Ducks
Update: Next up is our very own Nat Torkington giving the open source movement some therapy, and gaving a talk that was just too funny to blog properly...
Perl is the middle child that isn't getting any attention any more. "Why don't you love me any more?" says Perl? "Look, I've rewired the car..."
Python should get drunk, get laid, and shut up...
Don't think of open source as projects, think of them as people...
Update: It's all about people,
Most people are morons..
Nat's saying that it's easy to be nasty, and the corollary is that it's hard to be nice. This was a great talk for Nat to close out his last OSCON on...
Update: Our final keynote speaker is James Larsson, who according to Nat embodies the hacker spirit, who is going to Pimp My Garbage...
...who it turns out is obviously clinically insane, but in a great way.
Update: ...and got the best reception of the conference. My guess is that a lot of this was for talking about his project which was intended to be,
A computer vision system that takes the drudgery out of boot fetishism
I guess you had to be there...
Update: ...and we're done!
OSCON: State of the Onion
So slipping into the back of the room at the tail end of the Perl Lightning Talks, and caught Pudge performing Perl In a Nutshell.
I'm now sitting in the Perl Foundation Auction. Its got to be one of the few auctions you'll ever attend where the auctioneer heckles the goods he's trying to palm off on the unsuspecting public, and boy do they have a lot of books and t-shirts to auction off this year...
...anyway, we have a book on it, who want's it?
...hardbacks! You can hit people with these!
Update: ...and we're done with the auction. Now it's time for this year's State of the Onion given as ever, by Larry Wall, and this year entitled "Programming is hard, let's go scripting!"
All language designers have the idiosynchrosies, I'm just better at it than most... - Larry Wall
...and we're done. Larry's talk was, as always, really funny and entertaining, but totally un-blog'able. Maybe Chris did a better job?
OSCON: Prototype and Object.prototype
After the afternoon break, and we're back with Prototype and Object.prototype: JavaScript Power Tools given by Amy Hoy. As Mark mentioned earlier in the day, there a bunch of different AJAX toolkits, and Prototype is one of the bigger players.
Amy Hoy talking about prototype
Javascript is a real language, and everything is an object, really, everything. Even strings are objects,
var string = "This is a string"
string.length;It relies very heavily on functions, while it does have objects, it doesn't have classes. It's a prototype based language...
Update: It's interesting sitting in Javascript talks, the people giving them sound the same way people did giving Perl talks five years ago. They start off justifying their language of choice, reassuring you it's a real language and explain why it can do cool stuff. Thinking about it, there are a bunch of ex-Perl hackers working on AJAX related stuff as well. Interesting, don't you think? These people are definitely drinking the Kool-Aid.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
OSCON: Body Hacking
I'm in Quinn Norton's talk on body hacking and functional body modification. It looks like O'Reilly have toally underestimated how popular this was going to be, it's packed, forget standing room there isn't breathing room.
Quinn Norton talking about body hacking
You are the platform...
This isn't going to be your average OSCON talk, there will be warnings on the slide before if there is going to be blood on the next slide. I've been trying to keep this blog safe for work, so we're going to have to see how much of this I can actually blog.
So what is body hacking? It's "...acting on yourself, with or without assistance, to enhance the function of your body or your perceptions". Stealing Make:'s motto,
If you can't open it, you don't own it
Update: She's talking about getting getting a rare earth magnet embedded inside one of her fingers, near a nerve bundle, to allow her to actually sense magnetic fields. The key factor here is neuroplasticity, allowing parts of your brain to repurpose itself. As time went on she could could sense live wires, spinning hard drives and phone chords.
It's like sticking your hand inside an ultrasonic cleaner
But then, "..who has actually done that?".
Update: Now she's showing us why you don't want to do this, shortly after she had it implanted the sheathing around the magnet breached and bad things happened.
Update: She's talking about Amal Graafstra who had an RFID chip implanted in his arm, and about how there is a theme of control.
Update: Moving on Quinn is talking about CT scans and using the the available open source software to take control, and about the UK expert patient programme, which I hadn't heard of before. She's arguing that there is a fine line between expert patients and body hackers. For instance; glucometers, blood surveillance, brain monitoring and reading all of this live to the internet.
Update: Apparently there are now consumer EEGs coming onto the market, and these are at the point where you can actually figure out facial expressions and emotional responses. This is pretty amazing stuff.
Update: Interesting, she's talking about experiments with a directional sense, integrating a GPS and a buzzer allowing you to always know where north is, comments from the audience indicate that the US airforce have been doing this in their flight jackets since the sixties.
Update: Interesting stuff here Provigil is a stimulant that lets you not sleep. But there is no downside as the side effect profile is minimal. You still want to sleep, and you still feel like you want to, but unlike normal you can actually still function while in sleep deprivation. Then there is CUV1647, which gives a tan, makes you loose weight and increases your sex drive. The company that's made it is desperately looking for a disease, because you can't get a drug approved just because it's good for you.
Update: So whether we call it enhancement or treatment matters for social acceptable, but doesn't actually reflect on the procedure itself. The problem with this is time scale, we used to have generations to adjust, now we have decades at best.
Update: Best quote of the day perhaps?
Amateur brain surgery, sounds like a bad idea...
Update: She's closing out with "the next open vs propriety debate". Apparently there is a gene which can be used to test for breast cancer, but the gene is patented, so there is only one company in the world that can do the test and they charge US$1,200 and the test has to get mailed to Utah to get processed because that's where the only lab that has a license is located.
Update: The question she's asking is "How far is too far?" and "What counts as Human?".
OSCON: Ajax and Web Services
I'm in Mark Pruett's talk on Ajax and Web Services. He's defining an Ajax application as a web service client that runs inside a web browser, and he's going to be talking about both REST and SOAP services.
Mark Pruett's talk on Ajax and Web Services
Mark argues that people go through an evolutionary path in the way they use Ajax, they start off sending back a chunk of HTML, they move on to sending back delimited text, then XML and finally some people move to JSON.
There a bunch of client side Ajax toolkits: prototype, Dojo, GWT (Google), Atlas (Microsoft), Rico, Zimbra, DWR. Some of these, like GWT and DWR are tightly coupled with the server side language. You probably want to pick a toolkit that doesn't do that...
Update: He's talking about the whole SOAP vs REST debate, and arguing that externally you should expose your services via REST, but internally SOAP might be more appropriate, or at least more frequently used. Which isn't necessarily the same thing.
Update: REST uses GET, PUT, POST and DELETE. Where GET will get data, a PUT will create a new resource, POST will update an existing resource and DELETE will delete an existing service. Although of course there are certain limitations to GET which means that you sometimes have to use POST anyway.
Update: He's just totally dismissed synchronous REST requests, arguing that you should always use asynchronous requests. Which seems like a lot of overhead for simpler services. Although he's also arguing that you shouldn't bother with XML, but you should be using JSON instead, which means you can do this,
var my_json;
my_json = eval ("(" + http_request.respinseText + ")");which I think is probably officially evil.
Update: He's moving on to talk about the cross-domain problems. This is something we've all run into before, because of course you can only do Ajax calls to the server that delivered the original page. One way around this, which actually hadn't occurred to me before, is to use Apache ProxyPass rules and redirect calls to other servers transparently to your client side Javascript.
OSCON: Error Handling in Ajax
Next up, I'm in the Error Handling in Ajax session given by Anthony Holdener, who seems to be running late.
Update: Except that I'm now not. Nat just walked in and said that the speaker had mailed them months ago to say that he wasn't going to make it and the session was cancelled, except that nobody had actually got around to cancelling it. He didn't look that happy...
OSCON: wxPerl: cross-platform GUI design
I'm in wxPerl talk with Eric Wilhelm from Scratch Computing. wxPerl is the binding for the wxWidgets library, and unlike Perl/Tk the standard dialogs and other shiny stuff all look like should do on the platform you're running the application on...