Ars Electronica Festival coming up
I’ll be off to linz for the ars electronica festival tomorrow. After some initial trouble with their online ticketing service i got hold of a very nice lady on their helpline and placed my reservation for a festival pass the old-fashioned way. Hopefully everything works out ok, i mean i got a confirmation mail, but with these things i’m never at ease until i hold a ticket in my hands.
I’m looking forward to an incredibly interesting, rewarding, exhausting (in a positive way) week of geeky and artsy stuff. Just skimming over the program (weighing in at 54 digipages) i came across a lot of interesting talks, discussions, workshops, concerts and other events. I also noticed quite a few familiar names, some of whom i’ve been reading for almost 2 years now, like Joi Ito, Bruce Sterling, Lawrence Lessig, Howard Rheingold and Esther Dyson. I’m really looking forward to listening to them in person.
I didn’t have time to pick out the stuff i wanna see yet (somehow pdfs just don’t cut it for me, i should try to get hold of a hardcopy of the program), but i guess i can sort that out on the train.
I’ll try to post notes over the course of next week (starting wednes- or thursday) and keep your eyes open for some live moblog pics from the floors as well.
dailystrips
If you enjoy online comic strips (and who doesn’t?) dailystrips is for you:
dailystrips is a perl script to automatically download your favorite online comics from the web. It currently supports over 500 comics and offers a ‘local’ mode in which strips are downloaded and saved locally to speed access time.
Installation was straight forward, but when i tried to run it, it complained that the LWP::UserAgent module was missing. Fink to the rescue the required libwww was installed within minutes and dailystrips was ready to roll.
Granted, the defs file isn’t up to date and considering the last update was released more than a year ago it’s not too far off to assume it’s been abandoned, but it still manages to fetch many strips perfectly well and changing the defs file doesn’t look too difficult.
Now if only it’d output rss feeds rather than ugly, old-fashioned html…
atomflow
The first result of what Matt Webb wrote about (which for the first time got me excited about atom): Diego Doval, Matt Webb and Ben Hammersley present atomflow. Now if only i had the time and energy to play around with this while it’s hot…
About Atom
Matt Webb describes why he likes atom, far too much stuff in there to summarize, just head over and read it yourself, it’s well worth it.
I didn’t pay much attention to atom in the past. Honestly i don’t know much about it other than that it can be used for syndication like rss. That’s also why i didn’t look into it before, rss always served me well. If there wasn’t this limit for descriptions to be no longer than 500 chars (if i didn’t completely misread the old 0.91 spec) rss 0.91 would still be my preferred choice for syndication feeds because it’s simple and beautiful. Given a data source and slight knowledge of any programming language to access this data, you can setup your own perfectly valid feed in less than an hour, even if you haven’t heard anything about rss before.
Matt Webbs post got me quite excited about atom, however. Perhaps it’s a mistake to get overly excited about something as heavily disputed as atom because of one single post on one single blog by one single author, but if his vision holds true, there’s plenty to be excited about in this atom thing.
Mac OS X for CS students
Julie Starr heralds mac os x for computer science students over @macdevcenter. Some good points in there, apple got a sweet little package for cs students with their latest os, arguably offering the best unix desktop system to date.
I’ve always been impressed by the number of apple computers at our university, not in the labs, but laptops carried by staff and students alike. Many professors carry a powerbook and there’s an increasing number of apple notebooks among students as well. Especially the 12″ ibook is a common sight, understandable considering how its price and portability cater to students.
Late to the party: my moblog
I recently started a moblog here, perhaps you already noticed one of the camphone pics that popped up a few days ago.
This is something i wanted to kick off for almost 18 months, unbelievable how long it took me to actually get it done. The moblog scripts are basically just a quick hack, nothing i’m perfectly happy with yet. Consider my moblog in public alpha test for the month of august.
Credit where credit’s due, so here’s a short write-up of other scripts and helpful articles which helped me whip this together over the course of two days: the script that does the actual mail-fetching is heavily based on the improved wp-mail script by john blade and the further improved version of this script over @peimic. Besides that i had to modify class-pop3.php as described in this post in the wordpress support forums.
Because i don’t have access to cron jobs with my current webhosting i wrote a little plugin for checking the mail account on a regular basis. The plugin api docs are a nice starting point and offer all the necessary information in an easily digestible form. And if you ever happen to need database access in your plugins, the wpdb class is apparently derived from ezsql and there’s a nice introduction to the class available.
As mentioned before my moblog scripts aren’t quite ready for release. I currently think about making a proper plugin out of it, but don’t hold your breath, (if ever) this may take a while. However, the scripts are already in use at another site and if you think my scripts would be helpful to you and seriously can’t wait, mail me and i’ll send you the necessary files with a few notes about how to set everything up.
48 hours time to market
Russell Beattie describes how he got molympics up and running within 48 hours, from idea to deployment. I’m really impressed by this hands-on approach. I bet in-bubble there’ve been overhyped business plans with less ground to stand on than this project.
Reminds me of 24h dot com which i already linklogged earlier.
Interesting interviews
In the past i wasn’t too fond of interviews, but lately i’ve started enjoying them a lot. Today two great interviews arrived in my aggregator.
The thing with a good interview i can enjoy is that there’s usually exactly one point or statement that captures my interest and gets me thinking, preferably introducing new ideas, adding context or broadening my view on things. And because i’m a lazy bum and don’t wanna summarize or paraphrase, i’ll simply quote the parts i found most interesting in these interviews:
First there’s this interview with Howard Rheingold @bwonline:
All these could dramatically transform not only the way people do business, but economic production altogether. We had markets, then we had capitalism, and socialism was a reaction to industrial-era capitalism. There’s been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production.
Never crossed my mind that there might be something lurking beyond capitalism… i’ll need a lot more thinking about this.
And then there’s this interview with Yuri Gitman @thefeature:
Let’s start by making viable interfaces for high-adrenaline and high-risk situations and activities, and then apply them to everyday mobile interfaces.
Our current interfaces are still clumsy, slow, distracting, and not safe for people physically in motion.
And while i’m linking some interesting interviews: there’s also been a 5-part series of interviews with academics researching mobile communications @thefeature which i almost missed (just recently resubscribed – they improved a lot since i last unsubscribed…). Haven’t read them all yet, so i’ll just put the links in this post for future reference: Mikael Wiberg, Carsten S??rensen, Niki Panteli, David Allen and Kristov Nyiri.
Tech and fashion
There’ve been a bunch of interesting articles about the overlap of tech and fashion, both areas i’m interested in, even more so when they meet.
First there’s fashionvictims (via smartmobs):
[...] a collection of garments that react (respond and change) according to the surrounding mobile phone calls.
Then there’s Computer Couture @thefeature, a nice writeup of interesting and promising projects in the field of smart clothing.
And via jean snow: Technology as Fashion, an article about the incredible success of the apple store in ginza.
Cellphones kill iPods?
So apparently the recent meme du jour’s been that the ipod (and other gadgets) will be wiped out because of the rising convergence of features in modern cell phones. I’ve already mentioned All Hail the iPhone and there’s also Convergence Kills @drunkenblog, i guess triggered by this eetimes article. I don’t buy it.
I’ve been a huge believer in convergence. More than a year back, i switched from a cellphone and pda to a smartphone. The cellphone and pda i used before cost me less than ‚Ǩ 200. The smartphone i bought cost my ‚Ǩ 280 in used condition and that was a year later. Some things worked better on the smartphone (primarily the phone part), some worse (primarily the pda part). The only new functionality i got was an integrated vga-quality digicam. For the kind of money i payed for the smartphone i could’ve got a much nicer point-and-shoot digicam if i hadn’t opted for convergence.
There’s one inherent problem to convergence devices: it’s almost impossible to satisfy customers. Just think of all the stuff you want in a phone. Than think of all the stuff you want in a pda. Finally think of all the stuff you want in an mp3-player. It’s extremely difficult to get just one of these devices right, but cramming all three into one device and getting it right is almost impossible, simply because different people expect different features and functionality.
There’s long been talk of the death of pdas and that smartphones will replace them. I believe this too, but i think we’re further away from this early convergence step than most people think. Until i see pdas replaced almost entirely by smartphones i won’t buy the whole idea of phones replacing ipods because there’s an even larger technological gap between phones and ipods than between phones and pdas. In three or four years perhaps, but not soon.