Closing the iTunes Divide Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

The iTunes divide which has existed ever since the introduction of video content to iTunes in the US back in 2005 has, with little or no fanfare from Apple, just been firmly closed...

With today's other announcement, and perhaps despite the rumours earlier in the month that this was heading our way, this is interesting timing. Perhaps we're looking at a UK iPhone launch rather than (or as well as?) a new iPod?

An iPhone without the phone? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

It looks like the rumours of yet another Apple product launch were right, for once, and the invite is certainly suggestive of a new iPod .

Welcome to the next generaton iPod?
Of course rumours of a widescreen video iPod were floating around long before the iPhone finally showed up. Maybe this time? But then, I'd still rather have a replacement for my 12-inch Powerbook...

Update: Or are we looking at a UK launch for the iPhone?

Update: Live coverage of the Apple Special Event on the 5th of September.

An act of rebellion Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Paul Graham has been one of my favourite dispensers of wisdom ever since I heard him give a keynote at OSCON back in 2004. In his latest essay Paul talks about holding a program in your head and what that means for the people that have to manage programmers.

Any good programmer in a large organization is going to be at odds with it, because organizations are designed to prevent what programmers strive for... Good programmers manage to get a lot done anyway. But often it requires practically an act of rebellion against the organizations that employ them. Perhaps it will help to understand that the way programmers behave is driven by the demands of the work they do...

Essentially Paul is saying, both in this essay and most of his other writings, that you should hire smart people and let them get on with things. Funnily enough I agree, but as always, the difficult thing is to find the smart people in the first place...

Podcasts and the cutting room floor Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

In the wake of the Google Sky release I did a telephone interview for the Guardian science podcast with Alok Jha. Most of the interview, predictably perhaps, ended up on the cutting room floor but at least some of what I said made the cut...

More Google Sky Tupperware Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

My quick hack yesterday where I PLASTIC enabled Google Sky generated a lot of email and encouragement. It also got me thinking about where to go next. However today's adventure in Tupperware I lay entirely at John Taylor's feet, it was his idea, although I must admit I hit myself squarely on the forehead and said "Doh!" when he suggested it...

More Google Sky tupperware...
Unfortunately yesterday's code only allowed Google Sky to listen for incoming ivo://votech.org/sky/pointAtCoords messages. Which isn't really as much fun as sending messages back out. I couldn't see an easy way to do that, but John could,

As for sending points out of Google Sky... you could add a URL to a marker so that when the user clicks on it in Google Sky it opens a web page. In our case we could have it pointing at a local web server that converts it into a PLASTIC message. - John Taylor

Of course that'd work just fine, so I quickly modified yesterday's code to do just that. Now when you send a PLASTIC message into Google Sky the <Description> tag in the Placemark has a link which, when clicked, will call back to the facade application's embedded webserver and allow you to send a PLASTIC message back to the Hub. This means we now have bi-directional control, both in and out, of Google Sky with PLASTIC.

I've uploaded the source code again, but please don't look at it too carefully, it's getting to be quite embarrassing how poorly it's written. I don't normally break object encapsulation like I've done here, but I was really keen to get this working. I've been putting off writing a "proper" Perl PLASTIC module for a while now, looks like Google Sky might be the thing that finally makes me do it...

Anyway, enough for today. Time to sit down and down this properly now I've proved to myself it's possible.

Turning Google Sky into Tupperware Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

The PLASTIC protocol is one of the big successes to come out of the IVOA and the VOTech Project. It is a simple to use, and perhaps more importantly simple to implement, communication protocol for client-side virtual observatory tools.

PLASTIC is a protocol for communication between client-side astronomy applications. It is very simple for application developers to adopt and is easily extended. Through PLASTIC applications can do tasks such as instruct each other to load VOTables, highlight a subset of rows or load an image of a particular area of sky. Although such operations are quite simple, they enable powerful collaborations between tools. The philosophy is that the astronomer should have a suite of interoperating tools at his disposal, each of which does one thing well and which can be composed according to his particular needs...

So of course one of the first things that occurred to me when I saw Google Sky was whether it could be made to play nice with all the other virtual observatory tools that are now PLASTIC-aware, and in the process turn it into so called "tupperware".


Google Sky as tupperware
It finally occurred to me this afternoon how you could do it, and I'm a bit embarrassed it has taken this long. I've written a small PLASTIC application, a facade, which registers with the PLASTIC Hub as normal and listens for ivo://votech.org/sky/pointAtCoords messages. These are PLASTIC messages telling interested applications to "point at" an RA & Dec. When such a message is passed through the Hub, say by CDS Aladin, it is forwarded to the facade application, which then builds a KML placemark file. The facade application then exposes this KML file via an embedded web server. If you then point Google Sky at this KML file via a new network link set to periodically update, e.g.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.2" hint="target=sky">
<NetworkLink>
 <name>Plastic Application</name>
 <open>1</open>
 <Url>
  <href>http://localhost:8001/getPoints</href>
  <refreshMode>onInterval</refreshMode>
  <refreshInterval>30</refreshInterval>
 </Url>
</NetworkLink>
</kml>

then any RA & Dec points getting passed through the PLASTIC Hub will start to appear as Placemarks inside Google Sky in more or less real-time. In other words, and to cut a long story short, I've sucessfully managed to PLASTIC-enable Google Sky, at least for inbound messages. Which is good enough to be going on with...

I've uploaded the Perl source code to the simple application which I put together to PLASTIC-enable Google Sky. So if you're a heavy PLASTIC user, and plan to become a heavy Google Sky user too, you might want to take a look. If you do want to run it, the pre-requisite Perl modules are below,

Config::User
File::Spec
Carp
Data::Dumper
Net::Domain
POSIX
Errno
XMLRPC::Lite
XMLRPC::Transport::HTTP
HTTP::Daemon
HTTP::Status

and if you don't already have them, they can be found on CPAN.

Of course with John Taylor having just been hired away from the VO by Google there may be a real PLASTIC interface in Google Sky's future, as John is widely considered inside the IVOA to be the man behind the protocol. Although he'll normally point you to the list of other people involved and shrug his shoulders if you mention that. But in the mean while, I'm pretty happy with my quick hack...

Update: More Google Sky Tupperware...

The iPhone unlocked Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Engadget is reporting that the software unlock solution being offered by iPhoneSIMFree.com is legitimate and does indeed do exactly what it says on the tin, unlocks the iPhone from AT&T.

CREDIT: Engadget

Of course it looks like the company that is offering this isn't going to just give us the code out of the goodness of their hearts,

Individual per unit licenses will be available starting next week. We are currently opening up our mail for bulk purchase enquiries of 500 licenses and above... - iPhoneSIMFree.com

Sounds pricey to me, so I guess I'm holding out hope that the guys over on the iPhone Dev Wiki will get there real soon now as well. From past history they'll probably just give the code away, which will be nice...

But if you can't wait for that, then Engadget have more...

Update: Looks like AT&T might make it hard to sell an unlocked iPhone, and there has been some discussion about whether it is legal (in the US) to do so...

Update: So about three weeks on, the iPhone Dev guys have come through with their software unlock, supposedly using the same method as the iPhoneSIMFree unlock.

Update: It's official, the first free and open source unlocking program for the iPhone have hit net, and Engadget have all the details...

CREDIT: Engadget

Update: There seems to be some debate about who should get credit for the hack, my best guess is that the iPhone Dev Wiki team are the "official" source of the unofficial unlock.

Update: Gizmodo has more on the mounting controversy over the source and credit for the software unlock.

Update: ...and more on the controversy from TUAW.

Dynamic image resizing Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

A link just got past to me about the new "scene carving" algorithm, introduced at the ACM's SIGGRAPH convention, for on the fly intelligent image resizing. This is actually pretty neat stuff...



Update: The original paper is also available...

Google Sky Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

We knew it was coming for a a couple of years now, and here it is at last. The latest version of Google Earth has the first release of Google Sky embedded inside it. Even if it is quite hard to find...

Google Sky is part of Google Earth v4.2 beta
More from me when I get my head around what it's going to mean for the professional community, but I can see changes coming. I think my VOEvent time line representations might just suddenly have become very old hat. At the very least I think I'd better start generating KML links from inside eSTAR.

Update: I've spent the afternoon poking around with the internals of the VOEvent broker and the KML documentation and I currently have a live network link (KML) connected to the broker. This means that any OGLE, Robonet-1.0, ESSENCE, SDSS, GCN or other event messages that flow across the backbone will be automatically published to Google Sky.

Right now the descriptions and other details attached to the placemarks are fairly basic, but I'll work on this again tomorrow and hopefully make some progress. The other things to take note of here is that this is a live feed, that means there won't be that much to see yet since I haven't pre-populated the network link with content. You'll see it in real time as it flows across the network...

Update: The Caltech guys have had a little bit of a head start since I'm told that Google Sky uses Caltech DPOSS images. This is what they had lined up and ready to roll for the launch,

Today Google has released a new Sky layer for Google Earth. In conjunction, the VOEventNet project is pleased to announce a set of mashups showing recent astronomical transients, updated every 15 minutes. The mashups show GCN feeds (SWIFT, Milagro, Integral), the GRBlog (contains sky-located GCN circulars), as well as OGLE microlensing events. The event feeds contain VOEvents, and drilldown is available to finding charts, light curves, and original VOEvents. - Roy Williams, Caltech

As you can tell from the boilerplate in the credits in their mashups, my own eSTAR project in Exeter is part of the VOEventNet project. In fact we provide the OGLE event feed data they're using in their as OGLE network link. Of course since Google Sky was covered by non-disclosure agreements today is the first I'd heard about things. Oh well...

Update: While those of us on the inside haven't quite grasped exactly what Google Sky means yet, most of us have figured out that the world has changed. There has been a large number of emails flying back and forth on mailing lists today, and I think a few people are going to be surprised by the next few months. But unlike the professional GIS community, who were really surprised by the traction that Google Earth managed to gain amongst professionals and non-professionals alike, astronomers have a long history of the general public looking over our shoulders as we work. So one thing that isn't going to surprise us is user generated content.

Of course we're in the middle of revolution in astronomy with the virtual observatory finally beginning to bear its first fruit. The arrival of Google Sky isn't really a coincidence, but it is well timed. The mashup I put together this afternoon was really only possible because of that timing, two or three years ago the data wouldn't have been accessible in the same way as it is today.

Update: I'm really puzzled by why people are talking about Google Sky as if it was planetarium software. I think they're missing the point, I don't think the guys at Google ever intended it to be planetarium software. Google Sky isn't about whether you can observe the Ring Nebula from where ever you happen to be standing at the time. It's all about publishing, indexing, and sharing information. Surely that was obvious? It's about collaboration and user driven content, surely?

Update: Another quick hack from me to PLASTIC-enable Google Sky.

Facebook on the iPhone Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I have to agree with Mike Arrington over on TechCrunch. The new Facebook site for the iPhone is absolutely beautiful. I fired it up inside iPhoney and it looks gorgeous. For reference, this is what iPhone applications are "supposed" to look like...

CREDIT: TechCrunch

The new Facebook site for the Apple iPhone

Hurricane Flossie Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

All the best for the guys battening down the hatches ahead of Hurricane Flossie which is currently bearing down on the Big Island...

CREDIT: NOAA

Hurricane Flossie (KML)

Update: I'm guessing that the earthquake didn't help?

Update: An update from Sam, it looks like the Big Island got off relatively lightly this time around...

Update: Hurricane Flossie fell apart before hitting the big island.

When is an API, not an API? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

When it isn't released yet? The general opinion is that Apple will open up the iPhone to third-party developers in October by providing a software development kit (SDK) with Leopard. I don't know anyone that isn't expecting this to happen now that the API has been more or less reverse-engineering and the first "professional" third-party applications are seeing the light of day.

Nobody is selling anything yet, but its interesting to see companies like Delicious Monster are willing to release native applications. Sociologically at least, this is a whole different kettle of fish than individuals releasing terminal emulators and other such stuff. Companies, even uber-cool ones are notoriously conservative. They generally take legal advise before doing stuff like this, and they're presumably pretty sure that Apple legal won't be dropping by to say hello in the near future. Which is interesting, no?

Nokia battery mayhem? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

It looks like we're in for yet another round of battery recalls, this time the product recall is for Nokia branded BL-5C batteries used in a large number of handsets. At least two of my handsets are affected by the recall, although fortunately my main phone, a Nokia N80, isn't...