Feet up! :

Still breathing

Long time, and little blogging...

So, as my first post for five or so months, there's a bit of stiction to resolve. As for me, I'm well (but busy), just too busy with the day job, the kids and other activities to post anything of consequence here for the time being. However, expect a little more action here in the next few weeks as there's a few posts I've been mulling over that I can't express coherantly in the truncated medium of microblogging.

Talking of microblogging, you can still find me on Twitter and Identi.ca, if you feel the need to check my pulse.

2009-10-15 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

2009-08-28 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

Where next for Grand Prix - GP2.0

So the FOTA teams have finally given up with Max Mosely's inept, meddling, petty dictatorship and decided to run a rival 2010 championship. This will relegate the FIA's "Formula One" to an also-ran or feeder status.

But perhaps the real question is, which circuits will the FOTA teams use? I'd like to start the ball rolling with Le Mans, the obvious choice is the Bugatti circuit, but an F1 car on the Mulsanne straight is quite a thought!

Suggest a circuit on Twitter or Identi.ca with the #GP2.0 tag and see whether we can influence Ferrari et al. If you're stuck for ideas, Wikipedia has a list of circuits which have hosted a FIA World Championship race from 1950 to 2008.

2009-06-12 links

SCIENCE SCOUTS
- Tags web culture geek scouting
Timeline Index – People, Periods, Places, Events…
- Tags tools reference history
OpenGeoData – Augmenting photos – with OSM!
- Tags web maps gis gps

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

2009-06-10 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

2009-05-15 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

2009-05-12 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

Ergast Motor Racing API

The above is from the Ergast API Gallery. In their words: "The Ergast Developer API is an experimental web service which provides a historical record of motor racing data for non-commercial purposes. Currently the API provides data for the Formula 1 series, from the 1990 season onwards."

It's an absolute goldmine of Formula One stats, and trivially easy to use, the API Documentation gives you a taster. The api is RESTful and has great urls for every request and json or xml results. If you're just into mere tinkering most web browsers will present the xml in a very usable form. I've used the core data for the Wiki's Grand Prix 2009 page, I now need to write a script to auto-populate my wiki page with the latest results after each round.

Imola 15 years on

Fifteen years, wow. Five years since I wrote about Imola 1994 on the now defunct Fun-1 blog where Ewan and I used to scribble things that amused us about motorsport. A lot of things have changed in Formula 1 in the decade and a half since Ayrton and Roland paid the ultimate price for the sport they loved. High cockpit sides, HANS, smaller long-life engines, moveable front wings, KERS, night races, old tracks losing races (Imola, Indy and Montreal amongst them), new (but ultimately boring) circuits in new countries, ITV winning (and eventually handing back to the BBC) UK TV coverage; Frank, Flav (Swiss Tony), Bernie and Max somehow staying in charge, Ronzo putting on his slippers, Michael winning many titles (and at least one without cheating). Far too many things to fit into one sentance.

One could speculate about what Ayrton would have done if he had survived; World Championships at Williams (instead of Hill and Villeneuve), running a team (like Emerson), ice racing (like Prost!?), Indy 500 (like Andretti, Mansell, Hill, Montoya), or even politics (like Reutemann)? At the end of the day though those are just wild guesses, or possibly hopes. My thoughts about Ayrton have changed too, 15 years back I did not like him, 5 years back I was still rather harsh on him, but I'm much more mellow these days; he was a sportsman driven to win by any means he could, without that drive he would not have got where he did, and we would not have had the opportunity to witness his great skills.

Am I going to spend the day with a black armband? No, I will be celebrating their lives and that of the human spirit. Take Ayrton and Roland's example, do a good job of what you do and enjoy life to the full.

2009-02-24 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

When the cloud bursts

What do you do when all your data is in "the cloud", and the cloud "bursts"?

That is the question being asked by users of social bookmarking site ma.gnolia.com this morning. Ma.gnolia are just the latest in a long line of services that have disappeared or lost user data. In this case getting the data back appears to be reasonably straightforward (use the rss Luke!), a bigger question will be how to use this data.

I have a few rules of thumb on what I look for in a service, but first, and most important, do I place any value on this data? Do I care if it vanishes overnight? If not then I ignore most of the following.

How do I get my data out of the service? Useful for backup and migration purposes
If I can get the data out, what about meta-data like state, i.e. details of unread/kept messages in services like Bloglines or Google Reader, a roster from an IM service, message states and address books from webmail.
Can I easily put data (and state) in a standard format back into this service?
Can I run this service or similar with minimal hassle on a box at home? I could be mad, but I'm not overly keen on giving up control or my data to others.

What's the big winner? Open standards, imagine that Gmail ceased to be available as a free service, you could use imap or pop3 and take your email elsewhere, similarly opml for an aggregator. Sure these examples don't include meta-data, but you've covered the basics.

When you hand your data to a silo, can you get it back in a usable form?

Update: Kevin Smith from the Psi Jabber/XMPP Client project has written a useful tool to migrate your data between xmpp servers, try doing that between MSN and AIM...

2008-11-17 links

C++0x – Wikipedia
- Tags reference c++ standards
Nokia Friend View – rukapedia
- Tags nokia geolocation im
Nokia Chat + Robot + Plazes
- Tags mobile nokia geolocation Jabber
Inside Nokia Chat’s XMPP
- Tags nokia geolocation Jabber im

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

Saving Mobuzz

You probably already know that the daily buzz is one of my favourite vlogs. However the bad news is that the global financial downturn seems to have caught the Mobuzz folks in a cashflow crisis.

To the best of my knowledge Mobuzz are the only major European video blogging organisation producing shows in more than one language. I follow the English show and a couple of the Spanish shows, but not the French one which is a little strange because my French is far better than my Spanish, and Osiris is a babe.

But I digress, Mobuzz's content is far more pertinent to us Europeans than similar shows from the US, and they really are worth saving as a business. Details of how to do so can be found here, the easiest route being to go to paypal.com and send some funds to paypal@mobuzz.com I'm sure they wouldn't mind receiving envelopes stuffed full of used tenners either though...

Lets hope that thermometer gets hot quickly!

2008-10-23 links

The Tao of Mac – Skyhook Wireless
- Tags geolocation wifi web tools
Christophe Berger : Py S60
- Tags mobile python symbian nokia wifi gsm software geolocation

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

2008-09-12 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

2008-09-10 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

Using TTYtter with Identi.ca

Since Twitter gave up on providing IM and sms access to their service, leaving most people stuck with web and api access there's been a variety of apps surfacing. Personally I use TTYtter a Perl command line app, nothing pretty, but it works for me.

Interestingly since the microblogging service identi.ca - which uses the open source tool Laconi.ca - started offering a Twitter compatible api you can now use TTYtter with identi.ca

To do so you need to edit the .ttytterrc file in your home directory so that you replace http://twitter.com/ with http://identi.ca/api for any urls, and disable polling for direct messages as identi.ca does not support these yet. The changes are as below:


url=http://identi.ca/api/statuses/friends_timeline.json
rurl=http://identi.ca/api/statuses/replies.json
uurl=http://identi.ca/api/statuses/user_timeline
wurl=http://identi.ca/api/users/show
update=http://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.json
dmurl=http://identi.ca/api/direct_messages.json
frurl=http://identi.ca/api/friendships/exists.json
dmpause=0

2008-09-03 links

Taken from Jim’s del.icio.us links

Chrome not so shiny?

Think of this as a grumpy old man's first-thoughts on Google's Chrome browser. I'm torn between a few feelings on this, I'd like it to be good, but I don't know if we need yet another browser, and I don't want to be forced to support Google's world domination plans. I'll drop my first thoughts into three traditional categories.

Good

It's "open-source", and uses Webkit. However, with the closed/restricted source track record of Android, I'm a little sceptical, and the source code is not yet available at Chromium.org, plus the Google build "is based on" Chromium, so the Google build is still effectively closed source.

Anecdotal performance and memory usage tests are comparable with most of the other top browsers, which for a beta is a very good start.

Bad

First off, the Comic, so I've got poor dress sense, and mediocre social-skills, but I'm not 9 years old any more, please don't insult your audience completely. A cynic might think that Google had presented the info in graphical rather than textual form so that it was harder to archive and compare if Google ever decided to re-write history.

Google's EULA, maybe it won't stand up in court, but they can buy better lawyers than you or me. A EULA where you "let Google use any of your copyrighted material posted to the web via Chrome" is not good. You'd expect a hastily drafted, poorly written EULA from a startup, not so Google. So much for "do no evil".

Carpet bombing, oops, it's a beta so there's going to be problems, but I'd have thought security should have been further up Google's priority list.

Crashing? Not a problem according to the comic, each tab is an isolated process, if one crashes then you carry on with all the others running happily. Not so, in my experience, and all the reports I've heard are of the whole browser going ka-boom.

Google's apparent attempt at rebuilding the Austro-Hungarian empire, you may wonder how far Google's world-domination plans extend, but I think we can file this under satire, can't we?

Extensions and plugins? Not supported as yet, the infamous comic mentions these, but's who's going to bet on Adblock Plus being available on Chrome any time before hell freezes over?

Windows only? Surreal, but as one of my colleagues pointed out, it's only a small step from running a "browser" as a seperate process in a tab to running any type of process you want "in a tab". The whole compartmentalising of each tab, with a security model and controlled access to external resources like storage is very much like an operating system. What's to say that the role of the "shell" that currently runs and supports the individual browser tab processes can't be extended enough to make the premise of "what OS does this browser run on?" entirely redundant.

Ugly

Hard-coded Vista theme for the shell, which looks OK on "standard" Vista, and looks like a turd on XP or XP-themed Vista. I can only assume no UI experts were used in the making of this product.

Summary

I'm still sceptical about Google's good intent, but I can't fail to be impressed by how good a product this is for a version zero browser. Charles Nutter's thoughts on Chrome aren't that dissimilar to mine, the "why didn't you just help Firefox" question and the "ship beta, release code later" approach stick in my craw. I'm going to give Chrome a miss for another six months or so, perhaps the time to use Chrome is when it becomes the standard browser on Ubuntu. Which would either be a statement of faith by Ubuntu in Chrome's quality and Google's good intent, or a sign of Ubuntu selling out...