TiddlyBlogger updated

I’ve recently updated my original TiddlyBlogger code to include JayFresh’s additions mentioned here (cheers for your work here Jon).

The added features are:

• You can publish tags
• You get a response to the XML-RPC Ajax call (i.e. you know if your post was successful
• The ‘publish as blog’ option now only appears when you add the tag ‘blog’ to your tiddler.

Changes planned for the future are:

• Being able to pull down blogs from WordPress (and editing them).
• Support for more complex formatting (hyper links, bullet points etc)

Musings on facebook status’

Over the last few days I’ve noticed something strange happening. I’ve started to think in terms of my facebook status. I’ll be at my desk and in my head I’ll say ‘Craig is…’ something or the other. Earlier on I was thinking ‘Craig is… going for a haircut’, when I got back I was thinking ‘Craig is… wondering why hairdressers never listen’. I think you get the point.

My point is that it’s become almost second nature to me to transpose what I’m doing and feeling into facebook terminology. I wonder has anyone else noticed this?

I wonder if it will affect us in any other ways? Will we find ourselves thinking differently as we need to cope with managing both out online (virtual?) and physical selves.

I’d love to hear peoples thoughts.

Media streaming with PS3 (DivX, Xvid)

I’ve had a strange day today. I started off loving Sony, then I hated them, now I’m almost loving them again. I’ll explain:

I’m fed up with watching all of the torrents that I download on my PC in my study. I’ve got a 19′ widescreen monitor so it’s not terrible, but in my front room I have a 32′ TV and a projector, and I felt like it’s going to waste, especially as most of what I watch is downloaded.

So I set about to use the DLNA media streaming capabilities of my PS3 (this also works using an Xbox360):

• I have a local wireless network onto which my PC’s, PS3, XBox360 etc are all attached. So I thought that this would be easy.
• In your PS3 settings you need to ‘enable media server’ (or the like).
• Then on you PC you go to Windows Media Player (11, or Media Center) select ‘library menu’ and then ‘media sharing’. From here you can set the permissions for your different devices.
• If your device does not appear you’ll need to either change your firewall settings to let media player through, or you can disable it all together.
• Make sure you add files to your library.

I was now loving Sony. If you restart your PS3 (or search for media server), your PC will now appear and you can browse to files. Ahh, this is where you get a problem. The PS3 only supports mpeg media format. Now I hated Sony. You can do what some sites suggest and re-encode all of your files, or you can just use some other software to stream.

This is where I discovered  TVersity. This works in a similar way in that you need to build your libraries etc, but the cool thing about this is that it will change the format of the file to one accepted by the client as it streams it, and you don’t need to go and re-encode all of your media. In other words you can now play all of your downloads (DivX, XVid avi’s) on your PS3. Cool eh. Now I’m kind of fond of Sony, but waiting for them to release more codecs for the PS3.

Link for 2007-10-21

I’m not normally impressed by feats of extreme nerdness but this is pretty impressive. This guys plays tetris seriously quickly, and he then plays it with invisible bricks. Check it out:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo

Musings on The Godfather - can we lose focus

I recently watched The Godfather (parts one and two) again and was again blown away by the story. The thing that particularly fascinated was watching the similarities and difference between father and son (Vito and Michael). I won’t talk for too long about this, just wanted to note a few observations.

Both characters have the same main focus: the family. To both father and son, the family is the most important thing in their lives, and the way that they protect and better the family is through the family business. So they both center their lives around making sure the family business thrives. They do anything to keep it going, keep it respected, and to get rid of the competition.
There are also some firm principles that they both have. A key thing is respect. They demand respect from others, but also give respect where respect is due.

The thing that I find more interesting though are the differences, and I think they come from the start of both characters.

We see in the first film that Michael originally didn’t want to be involved with the family business (especially not the illegal parts), but he was almost pushed into becoming involved. By a mixture of both his own principles (love and respect for his father/family) and circumstance (the assassination attempt on his father) he found himself in the situation where he does get involved. In order to protect his father and family he murders two people. This is a brilliant scene because there is no music, just the sound of a train going past. As the train gets nearer you can feel the tension building. He’s thinking that once he does this his life will change forever. He’ll be a part of the family’s illegal activities.

In the second film we see the beginnings of Vito. As a young boy (I think he was 9 or 10) his father is murdered. Then on the way to the funeral his older brother is murdered. His mother begging for her child’s life is then murdered in front of him. Vito runs for his life and flees to the US. Vito turns to crime (I wouldn’t say that he’s forced) to help his family and friends. You get the feeling that he feels sorry for the people that are lesser off, and that get taken advantage of by those around. All he asks for is respect (and a favour at a later date).

Anyway my point is this: There is a scene in the second film that I think sums up what I mean and I’ll copy it here:

MICHAEL
…Tell me, when Pop had troubles…
did he ever think, even to himself,
that he had gone the wrong way;
that maybe by trying to be strong
and trying to protect his family,
that he could… that he could…
lose it instead?

MAMA
(Sicilian)
You talk about the baby. She can
have another baby.

MICHAEL
(Sicilian)
No, I meant lose his family.

MAMA
(as best she ever
understood it)
Your family? How can you ever lose
your family?

MICHAEL
(almost to himself)
But times are different…

Michael is now realising that his actions to make the family the most successful/powerful have actually made the rest of his family fear and dislike him. Look at his position at the end of the film - both his parents are dead (natural causes), his older brother is dead (assassinated by enemy), lots of family friends have been killed (some by him), he had his sisters husband killed and now she hates him, he had his own brother killed, and finally his wife aborted their child and left him.

In trying to protect his family, and a lot of that is by him doing the dirty work so that they don’t have to, he has ended up pushing them away. I think that this is a really good lesson in life. You can sometimes get so caught up with doing things that you forget why you’re doing it. I think it’s a good thing to remember that you need to stop and regather your self every now and again. I think Ferris Bueller summed it up (okay it was in a different context) when he said ‘Life moves pretty fast, If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it’

Tidying up code

I’ve gone through some of my sample files and tided up the code a bit:

http://www.craigcook.co.uk/samples/

I’ve changed the TiddlyWiki’s to have all of the code in one file (keeping with the ToddlyWiki sentiment). The script files are still there, and I’ll still keep adding them.

Goodbye Carson

I posted this in my old blog, but I thought I’d repost it here:

When I first heard that Dr. Beckett was going to be killed off in season 3 of Atlantis I was pleased. To be honest he always annoyed me, I thought that the creators were just trying to keep to a similar format to SG-1, where a doctor is a main character. I must also say that Dr Frasier in SG-1 had never been a favourite character of mine either.

The strange thing is that during that episode ‘Sunday’ I was actually starting to feel sorry for him. He was just trying to have a day off where he could relax and connect with some of his colleagues (friends), but his attempts were either brushed off or too late. I then realised that the previous few episodes had started to make me like him. It suddenly hit me ‘this is it’ he’s going to die in this episode, and I did genuinely feel sorry for him. It wasn’t exactly the most dignified of deaths, an exploding tumour, but at least it was noble. Carson was self sacrificing to the end, and will be remembered by fans of the show.

We can learn from this not to take for granted those that we have around us on a day-to-day basis. Some people may irritate or annoy us at times, but at the end of the day the world is a lesser place without them.

Musings over the great Facebook debate - friends are friends

So I was at ‘The great Facebook debate’ yesterday, an event hosted by BT. After some initial statements from people like JP Rangaswami, and some Q&A with them, there was debate over these two motions (I’m not sure on the exact wording):

“It was a mistake to open up the Facebook platform to developers”

“You should not accept you boss’ friend request”

I must say that I was quite disappointed with the wording of these, it led to people talking at cross purposes (perhaps the intent), people repeating the same thing, and people raising non issues. Nevertheless there were still some good points made, and some interesting lines of thought.

As to the first motion I was strongly against. It frustrated me that there were not even any real arguments for it (perhaps I’m being a bit strong here). The panel seemed to focus on the quality of applications, the number of applications and the usefulness of them. These are all valid points, BUT I don’t think that they are valid here. These issues are all down to the developer(s), and are on an app-by-app basis: if you don’t LIKE the applications made then these (reasons) would be good reason to click ‘remove’ or to in fact not add the application in the first place. You shouldn’t say that all applications should be removed because some (if not most) are ‘rubbish’. Remember you don’t have to add the application.

It was the second motion, or the discussion around it, that really interested me. I didn’t actually vote on this one because I really didn’t like the phrasing, it left for a lot of ambiguity (or none depending on the way that you look at it). You could imply from this that “my boss cannot be my friend” or “my boss must be my friend”. I think that the simplest reasoning for “SHOULD I accept a friend request from MY boss” is simply this: “if my boss is my friend then I’ll add him, if he’s not my friend then I won’t add him”. There was a lot of chat about “what if my boss sees pictures of me from the weekend” or “what if my boss reads what some of my friends say to me”, but I think that there’s a bigger point here, I don’t think it just applies to boss’, I think that it is:

“How do I manage my different identities across Facebook (or in life in general)?” JP said last night that if you compartmentalise different parts of your life that you’ll end up with schizophrenia, and I agree with this. The thing is though that most people do have slightly different persona’s or identities depending on the environment that they are in. Everyone adapts but we all adapt differently. There are things that you’ll say to you mother that you won’t tell your friends. There are things that you’ll say to your friends that you won’t say to your colleagues etc. It’s the margins between these differences that you need to think about. Some people may not be all that different at the weekend, some people may be as relaxed around colleagues as they are around friends or family. So I really think that you need to consider what it is you are hoping to achieve or get from Facebook; what part(s) of yourself do you want to be represented.

Consider it this way: Think of Facebook as a party. Now you have many friends, family etc that you could invite. You may be the sort of person where all of your friends get along, all of your family gets along and you could invite who you want and everything would be fine. Or you may be have the situation where some friends or family members do not get along. Or you may know if certain people are there they may offend others or perhaps get you into trouble (telling stories best left private etc). So you have to make a decision what sort of party you want to have, who you want to invite etc. I think Facebook is similar. You may have friends, family and colleagues that you’re perfectly happy to expose to each other and so adding them is fine, but then again you may not want to expose them to each other and in that case you need to choose what route you want to go down. Do I want just my friends as friends, or just my colleagues etc.

Of course there is the ability to profile and restrict access, but most people (rightly or wrongly) probably can’t be bothered to do any real configuration here. So what it normally boils down to is you end up sharing everything with people added as friends.

I think I can sum up with three points:

• Education. There are lots of features and security setting etc that people are not aware of. If people fully understand what the capabilities are, there will be less confusion, and perhaps less concern over issues that then become mute.
• Alignment. If the different aspects of your life are vastly different, then you need to manage (or at least be aware of) how they align or cross over (in Facebook).
• Choice. The web (and indeed life) is all about choice. You CHOOSE to add an application, you CHOOSE to add a friend, you CHOOSE to get drunk and do something stupid (which your friend may post a photo of). At the end of the day Facebook doesn’t force you to do anything. You don’t even have to have a Facebook account. So you cannot blame another person or a website for your actions.

TiddlyBlogger is here - JavaScript blog posting with XML-RPC and TiddlyWiki

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was interested in turning TiddlyWiki into an offline blogging tool. The idea being that you often get a spare few minutes when you’re offline, and you could use that time to do things like write your blog.

So what I’ve done is added an option to each Tiddler ‘publish as blog’. This calls an object that I’ve created (called blog), which builds and XML-RPC message, and then send’s it via Ajax. At the moment I’ve only tested this with WordPress, but it should also work with blogger and a few others.

You can view an example of this at:

http://www.craigcook.co.uk/samples/TiddlyBlogger.html

and the script file can be found at:

http://www.craigcook.co.uk/samples/BlogPlugin.js

You’ll need to modify some variables in BlogPlugin.js for your own blog details.

TiddlyMojo - Sending SMS and making phone calls with TiddlyWiki

So I took a slightly different route than planned this week. My day job steered me towards looking into mojo (http://mojo.bt.com). This is an implementation of the BT SDK (http://web21c.bt.com/) that allows you to create gadgets that utilise Web21C and can be easily be added to your website (or application).

So in keeping of all things TiddyWiki (http://tiddlywiki.com/) I created a plugin for TiddlyWiki that allows you to send a SMS and make a call from within your TiddlyWiki.

You can view a sample of it at:

http://www.craigcook.co.uk/samples/TiddlyMojo.html

Or you can just download the scriptfile directly:

http://www.craigcook.co.uk/samples/MojoPlugin.js

Please note that you will also need the following file for encryption:

http://www.craigcook.co.uk/samples/sha1.js