Techiedog-blog

Getting back to it and thinking about Twitter and other things

2009-07-11T14:45:00.004+01:00

How many blog posts are there out there in the world (wide web) which are mostly apologies for the lack of recent posts and the promise to be a little more productive starting ... now?

I've certainly read a lot ... I know that I've written several.

So, I'm not going to explicitly say any of that ;-)

Its true that much of what I would have blogged from a personal interest point of view finds an outlet on Twitter, which I still haven't decided whether its an incredibly useful communications tool or an ill conceived, perhaps even evil distraction.

Its true, that my good friend, colleague and collaborator Imran and I momentarily found our conversation falter when we last met up in person as pretty much every piece of news we had for each other was met with a reply of "Yeah, I know, I saw your Tweet!". Of course many have tried and failed to halt our free ranging, stream of consciousness tangent spinning conversations in the past, and so we were back on track before very long - but the whole experience set me thinking....

... There is a surface level at which Twitter and to a lesser extent facebook status reports and their like, appear to keep one informed as to the activities of one's nearest and dearest (and furthest and not-so-dearest for that matter), but there is of course a great deal of substance and context missing. Imran and I were indeed apprised of each other's news, but it took a proper conversation to understand any of it with any depth. In much the same way that a picture postcard doesn't render the post holiday story conversations superfluous.

A slightly different example occurred last night with reference to my friend Zoonie. Now I consider Zoonie a friend even though we haven't been co-located in at least two and a half years and most of our contact has been through various social network apps rather than direct conversation exchange. I like the fact that I kinda feel abreast of whats going on in her life. However, last night I saw a stream of tweets from her which sounded fascinating but due to a context gap I had absolutely no idea whatsoever as to what the comments were all about. I was left trying to piece things together by cross-referencing all the other places that I know Zoonie's digital life leaves a trail.

A few years ago I was working with the guys at Calico Jack on system which would pull together conversations into contextually related bundles across telephony, email and IM. Throw in things like twitter, social networks and other personal publishing apps, such as Flickr and the concept seems more relevant than ever. Which, of course is what Google wave could start to unlock.

So, I guess right now I can see the value of Twitter as a stream of flags, conceptual pointers or log entries alluding to deeper activity; the missing piece for me right now is the mechanism to explore the depth or at least, fill in the gaps.

Or maybe I should just be happy with twitter supplying a list of topics to talk about next time I get chance to have a proper conversation. The longer I work in technology, the more I discover the 'bits of life' that I don't want an automated solution for.

Its all over

2009-05-16T20:38:00.001+01:00

Eureka Machines

2009-05-11T11:33:00.001+01:00

Finally saw these guys opening for Ginger - most exciting new band I've seen for years!

Ensembli blog

2009-02-25T08:49:00.001Z

Its been a while but we've now got ensembli's blog up and running.

Find it at blog.ensembli.com

URL shortening

2009-01-29T14:33:00.001Z

There is no shortage of URL shortening apps around on t'web. And here is another!

O'Reilly Iginite - Leeds

2009-01-22T13:07:00.002Z

Tonight I'm one of the speakers at the O'Reilly Ignite event in Leeds.

Imran has the schedule and background details up at his blog - though I've changed my talk at the last minute ;-)

OpenCoffee - Huddersfield January 21

2009-01-16T11:22:00.002Z

The first OpenCoffee event of 2009 take place on Wednesday 21st between 10am and 12 noon at The Media Centre. Come along!

Details here

Admitting defeat

2008-12-02T11:24:00.005Z

Weather is against me - today for the first time in 2008 I couldn't get get to work by motorcycle, in fact I couldn't even get as far as the main road for re-frozen slush.

Hiking the hills is going to feature more than biking the hills for a while I guess.

Recovering my bricked iPhone

2008-11-29T10:15:00.003Z

While updating my series one 16GB iPhone to OS version 2.2 it all went TU.

About 20 percent through the update it crashed out.

After 'ejecting', the iphone was stuck in the 'connect to iTunes' icon state.

On reconnecting the phone to my MacBook I was channeled into the only option which was to restore the iPhone however this crashed out at about 20% on the progress bar with an 'Unable to restore iPhone' error code (14) every time I attempted it.

The fix?

So after surfing a load of blogs and forums and trying various options I found the following worked for me:

I created a new user account on my mac*, logged into it, connected the iPhone and hit restore. Once the phone was successfully 'activated' I disconnected, logged back in to my MacBook with usual account, connected the iPhone and voila. Well, almost - I've found by experience that the restore from backup option never works for me, so I hit the 'set up as new phone' option. This is a pain because it takes ages to resync all my data (mostly podcasts) and I had to go and reset my pone preferences, but in the end I ended up with my iPhone pretty much restored to the way it was before.

*
- Select system preferences from the apple menu (top left)
- open the “Accounts” pane
- click the padlock and enter your admin password
- click the “+” (plus) button to create the new user

Legal audio downloads

2008-10-14T17:59:00.002+01:00

OpenCoffe Huddersfield #4

2008-10-09T10:21:00.003+01:00

It's that time again. 4th OpenCoffee event in Huddersfield at the Media Centre, Web Oct 15th - 10:00-12:00.

details

Open Coffee Huddersfield #2 - August

2008-08-05T17:08:00.002+01:00

The 2nd Huddersfield Opencoffee meet with take place on Wednesday Aug 13th at Cafe Ollo in the Media Centre.

More details on Upcoming - do let us know if you are planning on coming along.

OpenCoffee

2008-07-16T14:20:00.002+01:00

The first Huddersfield OpenCoffee got off to a cracking start with 34 people passing through the event and a max concurrent attendance of 26.

We plan to repeat the meet up on the Second Wednesday of every month.

It was a great mix of Entrepreneurs, Engineers, designers, Investors, Legal peeps, and RIA types - a perfect mix. I managed to get around and talk to quite a few people but by no means all, but there were many active conversations happening.

OC Huddersfield date confirmed

2008-06-26T14:16:00.002+01:00

Wednesday 16th July, 10am at the Media Centre Huddersfield.

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/839039/

OpenCoffee comes to Huddersfield

2008-06-19T19:04:00.005+01:00

So, since I first got involved in OpenCoffee events when Imran kicked off the Leeds group early last year, I've made best efforts to attend any I could get to, mainly in Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester. For the last 18 months or so, my main office has been in Huddersfield which has something of a digital hub going on and in fact, I've met many a fellow Huddersfield based tech entrepreneur over in one of Imran's meets.
Its perhaps a little past due that we organized something more local and so I've been working with Ann Storey at the Media Centre to bring OpenCoffee to Huddersfield.

The inaugural Huddersfield event will be in mid July - we are just conflict checking our proposed dates - and you can keep track of things via the Huddersfield OpenCoffee upcoming group.

Come join us.

Recruiting - Developer engineer jobs

2008-05-12T12:03:00.004+01:00

Long time, no post!

Yep, I've been v busy, though the more widely read may have found me posting elsewhere.

Any hoo - to work.

I'm now the CTO for ensembli and I need to build up my engineering team.

I'm looking for self starter, software engineers with a range of experience but no one language or technology is requisite. In fact it you are an expert in one way of doing things then you probably aren't for us.

We'll be basing our offices in Sheffield and have junior and senior posts available.

The job advert can be found here

Google Party - web meme alert!

2008-01-29T16:16:00.000Z

So, I'm sure this is spreading rampantly and most of you have seen it already - but for those that haven't, here is possible the best encapsulation of current web experience I've seen through humorous anthropomorphism. I especially like the annoying Facebook!

Pointless cash-in tat?

2007-12-21T19:59:00.000Z

I spotted this while Christmas shopping:

Lost, the board game.

I didn't look too closely at the rules but I'm assuming that you go round and round the board with each turn seeming like you are getting somewhere but ultimately realize its the same every time. This goes on ad nauseum until one by one the players get bored and wander off only to get excited about 'Heroes the board' game for a while. Eventually however they all end up pining for the great days of 'Firefly the board game' and 'Carnivale the board game' which are far more fun, its just a shame they stopped manufacturing them.

Enterprise Networking Meeting - (post imcomplete)

2007-12-18T15:12:00.000Z

On Tuesday I presented a talk at Huddersfield University to the Enterprise Network.

I took as my theme the importance to SME's of keeping an eye on coming innovations and the tweaking of the variables in the status quo can lead to upsets. Large corporations have the cash to get actively involved in industry wide innovations where as all to often the SME see's paradigm shifting innovation as ssomething that is forced upon them.

Any hoo - I promise I'd publish links to the topics I covered so here they are (this post is a work in progress and I'll keep updating over the next few days).

Introduction/Mental Sorbet

Futurama - New York Worlds fair 1939

Wired article
WiKipedia entry
Film archive
Film clips on YouTube part I, part II

MIT City Car project

Boston Globe article
Guardian article

10 things to keep an eye on

1. The Internet

Or more specifically the move from IPv4 to IPv6
Wikipedia has a pretty exhaustive entry

2. Desk top Fabbing

(links to follow)

3. Phone-a-ma-jigs

(links to follow)

4. Quantum computing

(links to follow)

5. Batteries

Virus built batteries
(more links to follow)

6. The Long Tail

(links to follow)

7. RFIDs & Spimes

(links to follow)

8. Artificial, artificial Intelligence

(links to follow)

9. Communications Convergence

(links to follow)

10. Web 2.0

(links to follow)

Wrap up

Jet boots

The Finnish bird man video.

Funny

2007-12-07T19:09:00.000Z

So, there is a lot of weird and wonderful stuff out there on the Web and plenty capable of raising a chuckle, but my first laugh-out-load moment in some time came courtesy of Binoculars Soccer. Maybe I've been coding too hard over the last couple of weeks but this really amuses me.

Thanks to the ever reliable GromBlog and their fingers, which are fixed as ever firmly on the pulse of any Web Meme for bringing this to my attention.

New Offices

2007-12-07T18:58:00.000Z

I've just completed a week in my new office - the fantastic new energy efficient Friendly Street building at the Media Centre in Huddersfield. After spending the last 8 months or so lurking in a subterranean space in the Lord Street building its great to get some natural light!

I should mention fellow residents Wavestreaming the Internet Radio infrastructure provider who's pic you can see above.

Air scare crunch

2007-11-24T23:56:00.000Z

Fun with HTML, JavaScript and Adobe Air

I've been tracking Adobe Air for a while now, since it was called Apollo in fact, and earlier this year we ran a couple of tests for some of our prototypes. Last Thursday I caught one of Adobe's CS3 roadshows in Sheffield and got an overview of the latest release of Air which brought it back to mind.
For the last few weeks I've been hacking together some sweet AJAX for the interface for our upcoming alpha trial - after running into the same old IE doing it's own sweet thing nightmare I realized that wrapping the whole app up in Air and deploying to the desktop might solve all manor of headaches.

So, easy thought I, simply run my app through the air 'compiler' and ship to all OS's and no longer worry about rogue browser behavior. The current iteration of our app doesn't need any OS interaction, taking as it does only with a Web server, so what could be easier.

Well, its not quite as easy as that. The new version of the Air beta is quite different from the one I was playing with a while back. See, the post load alterations to the 'web page' which is the bread and butter of AJAX have become a security concern, especially when you throw HttpRequest coupled with JSON into the fray. Imagine a suspect JSON payload being eval()ed and doing all manner of nasties - now imagine that running under a framework which can also read and write to you file system - ouch!

So, Adobe have implemented a security model which tries to rectify the issue by running two sandboxes simultaneously:
i) The Classic Sandbox which will run all you good old Web apps but not allow access to the Air API which gives access to the OS etc
ii) The Application Sandbox which gives access to the Air API set but will not stand for any of that AJAX fiddling.

The good news is that you can still have your nice AJAXy interface built the way you like to do it and make use of the API through the use of the 'Sandbox Bridge'.

What all this means is that you can't just take you existing web app and run it through the Air 'compiler' an end up with a desk top app. If you do, your JavaScript won't run and you may see an error such as "Error: Parsing Disallowed". This is because the default mode is to assume the more paranoid (safer) Application Sandbox.

I myself spent hours crawling the web trying to work out why my HTML/CSS/JabaScript app worked perfectly in the browser (IE max-height humour ) but failed to work when compiled to a .air file. All the docs I had were out of date. At first I thought maybe it was something in the JQuery framework I was using - but after building simpler and simpler test models I eventually realized that even an alert box called as a function with 101 JavaScript doesn't work!

Part of the issue was that I abandoned the command line SDK because I was having issues with the path settings - again the result of out of date documentation - and instead added the DreamWeaver Air extension. Now - I'm old school, I started my scripting long before DreamWeaver, GoLive et al came along and so it took me a while to find the 'site' arrangement. Any how, in the end I got my app together and ran it though the Air create extension, which worked smooth enough - but my app didn't work.
It was only after getting a little bash help (I swear I used to know this stuff in the early 90's) and running my tests through the command line SDK that I found the error message "Error: Parsing Disallowed" - which gave me something else to ask The Google. Which lead me eventually to the security model documents and some worked examples!

Now all this sounds a little bit like hard work especially if you have a nice Web app and all you want to do is port it to the desktop to start getting a feel for AIR!

Well, the fact is that it is actually very easy - its just new so there are precious few quick start idiots guides out there.

So if you have been harassing search engines with queries like "Why doesn't my JavaScript work in Air","Air JAVASCRIPT problems" etc, I hope the example below helps you.

So, how is it done?

Well - You create a new HTML file which is the root for your Air app (the file your air XML file calls root) and in this you call your app start page as an IFRAME. Simple as that - well for the base case anyway. This new Root HTML file is the place where you set up the Sandbox bridge and Application Sandbox etc too - but hey you can work up to that.

So by way of a helpful example:

Your App start page:

Lets call this HelloWorld.html

Your Air app root

Lets call this HelloWorldRoot.html

And finally your Application Descriptor File

Lets call this HelloWorld.XML

Download a text file here with all this code in for cutting and pasting.

And thats it - stick these in the same directory at run the Air command line at the XML file - job done!

Now you know how to get your Web app to work on the desk top you can start looking at interacting with the OS through the Air APIs and setting up you Sandbox bridge.

Read about the security model and why here.

See worked examples to help with your next steps here.

More WGC news coverage ...

2007-11-11T19:58:00.000Z

... this time on TV!!!

With the rest of the team quite literally spread across the world last week, it was up to Dave to represent us when 'NewsChannel 9' swept into the office to do a piece on our little start-up. I'm not sure how long this link will work but take a look at the news feature, you'll have to wait through a short ad first.

Also, I believe we made it to the print edition of Business Week last week.

OpenCoffee Leeds {Sei} - The Low Down

2007-11-08T08:35:00.000Z

November 6th was the first Tuesday of the month and that means only one thing ... OpenCoffe Leeds. (Actually it means many things, not the least my Mum's Birthday! - but you get my point)

So the 6th OpenCoffee Leeds, on the 6th of November saw a happy band of loose affiliates and common interest holders once more descend on the venue and partake of the refreshments and WiFi all kindly provided once again by Justin.

Having pulled a couple of all-nighters, the feeble efforts of his ring tone invoked by my incessant stabbing of redial were inadequate to rouse Imran from his well disturbed slumber and so he never made it. Which is a shame, firstly because there were a number of interesting newcomers and secondly because it falls to me to report on the event!

Not the biggest turn out but we did notch up 23 concurrent OpenCoffee-ers (?) and see around 27 people in total pass through at some stage. Word on the street has it that many people were at their home/office frantically working on their demos and presentations for BarCamp.

As per usual we managed a nice spread of geeks, designers, entrepreneurs, academics, Venture and other generally tech related peeps.

It was heartening to see that the new faces doted around the place were getting actively involved in conversations. Had I realized I'd be on point as official correspondent this month I would have made more of an effort to get round everyone, as it is I got drawn into a number of very engaging discussions. However two stories I can recount are illustrative of the day.

1. Richard came along for the first time. He is overseeing the set up of interesting new MVNE company smallPlanet based in Huddersfield, and was fortuitous enough to be able to discuss the ins and outs of making a success of a small Telco player with Plus Net founder and tech business guru Lee Stafford.

2. Paul, a biochemist based in Leeds came along for a very different reason. He has a couple of very intriguing business ideas which he and a partner are currently developing. Paul is a smart guy but not well enough versed in computing to get a handle on the tech requirements of his product and so was seeking some assistance in this regard. Firstly he came away assured that yes indeed, there is more than sufficient talent around the area to help him spec up and build his product. Secondly that it wasn't necessary to blat around Cambridge, London or Silicon Valley to get tech startup funding (I was not the only one present to speak from personal experience on this topic). Finally he came away having met people who could either offer advice, help him directly or refer him to the tech talent he is going to need. And really, thats what this thing is all about.

Best of luck to both Richard and Paul and to all the others in the region who are cracking on and launching their own ventures.

No photos this month I'm afraid!

The December event is set for Tuesday 4th once again at Loftart on Vicar Lane - details of everything cam be found on Upcoming.

In the news!

2007-11-02T09:13:00.000Z

One of my most time consuming gigs this year has been as VP Engineering for startup WGC. We have spent a lot of time hacking away in our 'Lab', talking to potential collaborators and presenting at academic conferences fueled by a mix of visionary angels and belief.

In the new year we are set to unleash our first trial product, which will be installed in a student dorm at Syracuse University, NY. Now that we are on the verge of presenting something real as opposed to our demos and prototypes we are getting a great deal of Interest. Lee and Norman especially are dealing the with daily amourous advances of potential larger investors, industrial partners and customers.

Of course we have all had a strong belief in our technology and vision for some time but its nice when that potential starts to be recognized in wider circles and so I have to admit to being somewhat excited that Business Week saw fit to cover us in a story which pretty much gets the key concepts across.
Of course I'd have liked a little less emphasis on content sharing and more on Personal Infrastructure and hardware resource sharing - but in truth it has taken us a while to work out how to talk about these things in the wild and would probably have bogged down the article.