Our first Christmas in the cottage. A pity there wasn't any snow. But a nice walk along the Bradford anyway.
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Monday, 25 December 2006
Friday, 22 December 2006
The Negroponte Switch - 10 Years On
Nice article with an update on progress towards the Negroponte Switch - the idea that phones would go wireless and TV would go cable - the reverse of the C20 situation. I once wrote a classified paper on this and its impact on communication and signals intelligence.
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Foresight and Horizon Scanning
Couple of interesting sites linked into the UK Government's Foresight project.
www.sigmascan.org by Outsights - Ipsos MORI and www.deltascan.org by the Institute for the Future (IFTF).
The Sigma Scan is a quality assured synthesis of some of the world's best Horizon Scanning sources. It covers future issues and trends across the full public policy agenda. It is drawn from a range of sources including think tanks, academic publications, mainstream media, corporate foresight, expert/strategic thinkers, government sources, alternative journals, charities/NGOs, blogs, minority communities, and futurists.
The Delta Scan is an overview of future science and technology issues and trends, with contributions by over 200 science and technology experts from the worlds of government, business, academia and communication in the UK and US.
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Map of the Internet by IP Address
xkcd » Blog Archive » The Map of the Internet
Lovely visualisation of the IP space of the Internet.
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Wednesday, 20 December 2006
Top 10 UI Bloopers in the Movies
Usability in the Movies -- Top 10 Bloopers (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
Fun seasonal post from Jakob Nielsen:
1. The Hero Can Immediately Use Any UI
2. Time Travelers Can Use Current Designs
3. The 3D UI
4. Integration is Easy, Data Interoperates
5. Access Denied / Access Granted
6. Big Fonts
7. Star Trek's Talking Computer
8. Remote Manipulators (Waldo Controls)
9. You've Got Mail is Always Good News
10. "This is Unix, It's Easy"
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Friday, 15 December 2006
Second Life hits 2m users
Second Life today crossed the 2 million user mark. Time to buy more land!
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Monday, 11 December 2006
Custom last names in Second Life
"Last names must clearly be an organizational or corporate name, and distinguished from personal last names."
Where's my copy of Jennifer Government? Roll on John Nike!
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Saturday, 9 December 2006
Friday, 8 December 2006
Firefly on Multiverse
Wired News: Firefly Reborn as Online Universe
Hope its better than Serenity, and its a pity it's not Traveller. It is though exactly how I'm telling people that Multiverse will be used - internally consistent worlds supporting major media properties.
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News at Seven
Software generates video news bulletins - tech - 24 October 2006 - New Scientist Tech
Dynamic news from RSS feeds delivered by avatar. Nice.
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Wednesday, 6 December 2006
Freak Zone Live
Off to the Freak Zone live tonight. Children of the Zone unite. Stuart Maconie's programme continues to be the best mucis show on the radio.
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PVRs Rule
Our Humax PVR9600T (or whatever) arrived yesterday. All installed like a dream and set up the weeks TV to record. No more messing about with what's on what video tape. Hurray. Only niggles:
- the TV Schedule only appears to be 3-4 day lookahead (or maybe its a fixed Sat-Fri rather than a rolling 7 days)
- when you click on a recorded programme rather than play it it brings up the option box and sits over the Delete default - dangerous. To play it you have to press PLAY (ok, but a smaller button), and then it only plays in a window so you have to press MENU to go back to full-screen.
Picture quality of DTV/Freeview is great, even though I doubt we'll use many of the other channels (apart from BBC4 and Film4). Mind you More4 is showing thirtysomething reruns....
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Saturday, 2 December 2006
Wikipedia as RDF
Now that's fun. Wikipedia as RDF. Pity its only the metadata at the moment.
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Wednesday, 29 November 2006
3 Stages of the Digital Divide
Digital Divide: The Three Stages (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
Nice piece from Jakob's Alertbox. The 3 divides:
- Economic Divide
- Usability Divide
- Empowerment Divide
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AI in SL
Esquire:Feature Story:Philip Rosedale: Building a world entire
Which brings Rosedale to one next development that intrigues him as much as the world he's created: "I think there are interesting questions about this whole thing of computers thinking," he says. "The next thing beyond SL is whether things in there can think."
Nice to see that Philip and I are thinking (!) along the same lines.
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Friday, 17 November 2006
Starship Dimensions
Jeff Russell's STARSHIP DIMENSIONS
Stunning sight - particular as I was in SL with a group of fellow B5 fans discussing how great it would be to have a 3D version of something like this.
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Tuesday, 14 November 2006
Croquet
The Croquet Project is an open source VR world builder. What appears to be unique is that it lets you embed rich media objects, not just HTML or Flash or Word or Excel, but even windows into other Croquet spaces. Stunning.
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Friday, 3 November 2006
SL Weather Mashup
3D Weather Data Visualization in Second Life - Second Life Insider
Stunning
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Thursday, 2 November 2006
Launching a new kind of warfare
Launching a new kind of warfare | Technology | Guardian Unlimited Technology
Cracking article by the Guardian on the rise on unmanned combat vehicles. They reckon that by 2015 1/3 of the US fighting strength will be composed of robotic UCVs.
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Wednesday, 1 November 2006
Monday, 30 October 2006
Wednesday, 25 October 2006
Scrolling RSS Display in Second Life
Having started with a simple RSS importer for Second Life I've now put together a scrolling RSS and text display. This first one has 10 "character" elements, with each element supporting the characters A-Z,0-9 and about a dozen common symbols. Scroll rate is user configurable, but running at about 0.5 second per move works well. There is currently an LED or Arial font, I may do others - but users can upload their own. Text message or URL of RSS feed are set by chat commands.
All my SL products are being made available at my Nari office, or through SLExchange or SL Boutique.
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Friday, 20 October 2006
We Feel Fine
We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar
Amazing interface, interesting content. Could be fun to harvest it for Halo.
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SL Podcasts
Too numerous to mention, but Goddess and Banana is/was by far the best (they split up) for grass roots, and SLPodcast for more general stuff.
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Rainbows End - Vernor Vinge **
The book of the moment (at least in cyber-circles)
- or maybe not.
Whilst the whole thing about the Epiphany wearable overlaying different interpretations of reality on what people saw was fun, the whole plot side of things was dreadful - ditto much of the writing.
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Tuesday, 17 October 2006
Ditching Outlook
Having got Google Mail running nicely I've now re-installed Palm Desktop as my main PIM. All I need to do now is work out how to sync it with Google Mail so Deborah and others can get at my calendar on-line. This - CompanionLink for Google Calendar -- synchronize Google Calendar with Outlook and any mobile device. might help.
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Sunday, 15 October 2006
Colditz
After Jena Nick and I headedover to Colidtz, although 3 1/2 hours parked on an autobahn meant that we didn't get there til gone 11pm. Ralf met us and showed us to a hotel (he was booked), although we moved into his Guest House for the Sunday night.
Colditz was wonderful. We feel we caught it just in time as the Saxony government is gentrifying it into just another Saxon Schloss, and half is a building site for the new Youth Hostel that is takign over part of the old german quarters. Our guide - Frau Lippman - was superb and we had plenty of time to look at everything, the remains of old tunnels, equipment, photos, locations and so on. What struck me most was not only the ingenuity of the escapers (the British being after points for style more than success), but the way that the Germans appeared to give them every opportunity to escape (eg allowing a theatre group so they could then justify access to costumes, a sowing machine and electric lights).
The town itself was very quite, and old east germany lay just below the surface - more so than in Jena.
On the way back we had a quick look round the old Soviet airbase on which the Altenburg airport has been built. There's a Mig 21 on display, and the old parade square is now being taken over by weeds, but is still surrounded by soviet murals.
All-in-all a great weekend, and having spoken to some re-enactors it looks like Nick and I are set for the Penninsular Campaign, then on to Borodino and Leipzig (back here again), before doing Waterloo when we 56!
All in
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Saturday, 14 October 2006
Jena Bicentenary
Nick and I made it to Jena. Our hotel was in Apolda, but we spent Friday night in Jena having an excellent meal while Napoleonic soldiers marched round the town square.
We spent the Saturday morning looking round Hassenhausen, with the bivouacs of several Prussian and French re-enactors still in place. The museum there was small but good. En route from Apolda we'd taken in a castle and an amazing water filtration system at Bad Hosen. It was about 400m long, 20m high, made of wood and stuffed full of fir branches.
Trying to park at the battle site was impossible, every route in was blocked by police. In the end we abandoned the car up a side road, and just like the French on the morning of the battle legged it up the steep road to Closewitz.
I don't know what I expected but the scale of the whole thing was big. The battlefield was a natural bowl about 1km on each side. It sat exactly where the first part of the battle was fought between Closewtz and Lutzeroda. There were around 2000 re-enactors and some 50,000 spectators. We eventually found a near front-row spot close to the main stand and got some great photos of the troops. At one stage the artilllery was just in front of us - an amazing sight.
One of the reasons for being here was to get a feel for the wargaming issues,particularly visibility. What was immediately obvious was that altoughyou could see to the far side of the battle anything beyond 500m was just a blob, or a blob on a horse. Second was smoke. Even with 2000 men there was a lot of it. Cannon smoke tended to be concentrated and dispersed by the time of the next round (about 45 seconds, wind light to moderate). It was when the muskets started firing en-masse that the smoke became a significant cause of obstruction.
The other thing was the troop density. This re-enactment had about 2000 men in 1 sq km. Just under 3 battalions. At Waterloo there were 140,000 men in 6 sq km, that's about 20,000 per sq km, ten times as dense. It would have meant (a) not much room for manouvre and (b) a lot of smoke.
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Jena Campaign - 14th October
Midnight: Lannes 5th Corps and the Guard on the Landgrafenberg. Augereau's VIIth Corps coming up the Saale valley to Jena, Soult's IV Corps just clearing jena and Ney's VIth Corps just entering it.
Napoleon's plan was for Lannes to attack at 0600, and then expand the bridgehead on the plateau as the other forces arrived.
0600 - 1st Battle - By the Dornberg
Lannes 22,000 soldiers attacked Tauentzien's 8000 Prussians and Saxons in dense fog by Luetzeroda and Closewitz. By 0900 the Prussians are in retreat and the French take the high hill of the Dornburg.
0600 - Auerstedt
Davout's lead elements cross the Saale at Kosen and climb to the plateau, running straight into Prussian troops at Hassenhausen.
0900 - Auerstedt
The Prussian are deploying poorly and failing to exploit their numerical advantage. To make matters worse Braunschweig, their CinC, is killed.
0930 - 2nd Battle - Rodigen and Lehesten
Soult's IV Corps crests the ridge up the Rau valley N of Jena meet 5000 Prussians under Holtzendorf. After a fierce fight the French push through towards Vierzehnheiligen.
1030 - Auerstedt
Losses are heavy on both sides but the remains of Davout's III Corps is now on the plateau, and village to village fighting begins, going easier on the right thna the left.
1130 - 3rd Battle - Vierzehnheiligen
Hohenlohe has been waiting here with 20,000 Prussians since 9am when Soult and Ney start to attack. French cavalry persues the fleeing Prussians.
1300 - 4th Battle - By the Schnecke
An outpost of Saxons south of the Isserstedt-Jena road is attacked by Augereau's VII Corps and captured almost en-masse.
1400 - 5th Battle - By the Sperlingsberg
A counter-attack by 15,000 Prussians under Ruchel fails and they are stranded under intense French fire, their retreat leads to an uncontrolled flight.
1500 - Auerstedt
A general Prussian retreat is ordered
The following days see the Prussian army almost dissolve as it flees North. Davout is in Berlin by 25th October. By early November the Grand Armee occipied Prussian from the Danish to the Russian border.
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Friday, 13 October 2006
Jena Campaign - 13 October
The Prussians are fleeing North and West. Hohenlohe has taken up a position on the plateau west of Jena, almost half-way to Weimar to cover the retreat of the main body from the plateau to Leipzig, via way of Auerstedt. Napoleon is wasting no time in moving on the Prussians with Bernadotte's joining Davout at Naumberg, and Ney to Roda. But no sooner had the day started than Napoleon's intelligence informed him of the flight north by the Prussians so Davout and Bernadotte have been ordered to Dornburg, with the other troops concentrating around Jena.
3 pm: Lannes in Jena was reporting Prussians north of Jena, and soon after the sound of musket fire could be heard on the ridge. Napoleon hurried the concentration, told Davout to be prepared to swing round onto the right flank and Bernadotte to be prepared to come to Lannes aid should fighting start early.
4 pm: Napoleon has reached the Landgrfenberg, joining Lannes. When Lannes had reached the plateau earlier that day he had driven the leading Prussian elements back to the villages of Lutzeroda and Closwitz. Napoleon is convinced that he is facing the main Prussian Army and has ordered the remains of Vth Corps and the Guard to join him after dusk. All other forces except Davout and Bernadotte are ordered to converge on the position during the night of 13th and early 14th, with battle to be joined some time on the 14th.
Overnight Napoleon is working to pull the artillery up onto the plateau so as to be able to secure the Windkollen - the highest point there.
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Thursday, 12 October 2006
Jena Campaign - 12 Oct 1806
Hohenlohe's Prussians left Jena this morning in disarray, as the early arrival of Lanne's advance guard pushed the Prussians into panic. Frederick William and Brunswick closed on Weimar - protecting their links to the Elbe. The French meanwhile have advanced as far as Naumburg, well to the North of Jena.
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Wednesday, 11 October 2006
Jena Campaign - 11 Oct 1806
The Prussians today have been falling back to the River Saale. Hohenlohe has passed back through Kahla and is heading for Jena. Murat's cavalry have probed as far North as Gera and even the edge of Leipzig. Lanne's cavalry have confirmed that the Prussians have not crossed over the the East bank of the Saale. Napoleon is convinced that the main Prussian force is to the North and West, and not to the North East and Leipzig as anticipated.
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Tuesday, 10 October 2006
Jena Campaign - 10 Oct 1806
French campfires burnt all night south of Saalfeld, and by 10am the French force under Lanne . Prince Louis had moved his 8300 men onto the left bank of the Saal, commanding the exit from the defile towards Grafenthal. As Suchet's division of 14,000 left the hills it was engaged by Prince Louis. While skirmishers and light cavalry pinned the Prussians, Suchet attempted a left flank, Louis tried to strengthen that flank whilst advancing towards Beulitz. The fighting continued here and around Croesten, but at 1pm Prince Louis, leading five Cavalry squadrons was killed by the Quartermaster of the French 10th Hussars. The Prussians and Saxons fled to Saale, and the French are reported to have captured 1800 men and 33 guns.
The Prussians under Hohenlohe are falling back towards Kahla and Jena, and those under Frederick William and Brunswick towards Weimar. The expectation is that the French are heading towards Leipzig, and they do indeed appear to be heading for Gera.
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Monday, 9 October 2006
Jena Campaign - 9 Oct 1806
The French have continued to push north through the Thuringgerwald. This morning Bernadotte and Murat (above) in the centre encountered some 9,000 Saxons and Prussians at Schleiz, just North of the Wald. Murat's light cavalry, dragoons, and some of Bernadottes infantry cleared the small force and have opened the way towards Gera. By nightfall Lannes on the left has almost reached Saalfeld and Soult on the right is almost at Hof, both clear of the Wald. The Prussians appear to be falling back already towards Auma, some 15 miles SE of Jena.
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Napoleonic Total War
The Lordz Modding Collective - Mods for the Total Ware Series | NEWS
A Total War mod for the Napoleonic period. Suddenyl buying Total War moves from a "nice to" to a "must have".
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Sunday, 8 October 2006
Jena Campaign - 8 Oct 1806
Seeing as Nick and I are off to Jena at the end of the week I though it would be interesting to try and blog the build up to the battle in real-time. here goes....
Today (8 Oct 1806) Napoleon and his Grand Armee crossed into Saxony from south western Germany. It has been a phoney peace since the defeat of the Russians and Prussians on 2 Dec 1805 at Austerlitz. Both sides have been steadily building up their forces, and Napoleon now seems set to try and end things before the winter bites. His forces have been moving up from their concentration areas around Wurzburg , and in the last few days have crossed the Franconian Forest to take up positions on the River Main near Bayreuth. Napoleon is reckoned to have 180,000 men under arms.
The Prussians are arrayed along the north side of the Thuringerwald, around Saalfeld and to the north and west.
Napoleon is advancing in three columns each of 2 Corps, commanded by Lannes/Augereau, Bernadotte/Davout and Soult/Ney, with Murat's cavalry scouting ahead. There have been a few cavalry skirmishes with Prussian picquets, but otherwise the French are advancing un-opposed. As night falls the French columns have reached Coburg, Lobenstein and Munchberg - just on the south edge of the Thuringerwald.
Right click View Image for full size map.
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Friday, 6 October 2006
First SL Product - Smart RSS Reader
We released our first Second Life product today - our smart RSS reader. It uses a proxy on our server to read RSS, RDF and ATOM, and then send into SL only the titles for display. The user in SL can then ask to read a particular story by any unique keyword. Put it on at L$100. Will be interesting to see how it sells. Also signed up to SLExchange and SLBoutique, the two main SL e-commerce sites which let you sell in-world and on-the-web.
Just finishing off the display screen, should have that selling by early next week.
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Second Life Dreaming
I dreamt of Second Life for the first time last night. Obviously spending too much time in-world! (that and counting the prims on every real thing I see!)
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Wednesday, 4 October 2006
Google Mail
I made the switch to Google Mail today. What joy. What with the cottage and doing more work on the laptop I was getting fed up with having all the mail in Outlook on the PC upstairs. That and all the spam. I got Huma from Robitron to invite me in (thanks Huma) and its wonderful.
As an AJAX app its so much slicker than most web apps. Almost all the functions you want are where you expect them - except Reply which is stuffed down the bottom. The use of tags instead of folders works well. Spam filtering is very effective, and yes, I can now use any of my computers to do my mail - will make life so much easier. There's even an in-built chat system for other GoogleMail users. And the real icing on the cake is the mobile access using the SPV's browser - it works like a dream, a well designed mobile interface makes it all so easy.
I'm now tempted by the Google Calendar if I can get it to sync with the Palm, then I can junk Outlook totally.
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Tuesday, 3 October 2006
Better Life
This video is actually awesome - particularly as I'm mulling over ideas for a Second Life interface for visually impaired users. SL Machinima at its best.
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Monday, 2 October 2006
Brumcon/Brum2600
So that explains why the Bullring branch of Borders stocks 2600. Good to know that phreaking culture is alive and well in Birmingham.
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Sunday, 1 October 2006
Broadband in the Peak District
Got broadband into the cottage today. 2MBPS unlimited from Tiscali. Working within 5 mins of opening the box, very straight forward. Next step is to replace their modem with a WiFi ADSL router.
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Friday, 22 September 2006
first sl business meeting
ok, that was weird. my first proper business meeting in sl. Myself, as a fox, and three
women, two of whom are the same person, all talking about chatbots in the demo suite
anyway it looks like a great opportunity to get chatbots into SL through the SL Library, the
people who came second in the Talis Library mashup. Great fun.
blog end
Posted from Second Life at: Nari <53.84446, 168.29950, 180.95680>
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Everyware
A List Apart: Articles: Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
Cracking essay on ubiquitous computing. And it looks like a lot of people are using SL as a test-bed for the UC/AC model.
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Wednesday, 20 September 2006
end Posted from Second Life
end
Posted from Second Life at:Suffugium 92.49999, 112.33124, 34.14900>>
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town hall meeting Posted from
town hall meeting
Posted from Second Life at:Suffugium 92.49999, 112.33124, 34.14835>>
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Sunday, 17 September 2006
test from second life
looks like this is as far as I can go with the SL blogging tool so far.
can't find a way to post a hyperlink so that I can SLURL the location.
Never mind, see if I can find another way later.
Back to the RSS and chatbot SL scripts.
Posted from Second Life at: Nari 55.77996, 170.22108, 137.25417>
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Saturday, 16 September 2006
correct title this time
just checking
blog end
Posted from Second Life at:Nari 55.77996, 170.22108, 137.25417>
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test title
blog blogging from second life
this is a test of my blogging object in second life
it lets me blog from wherever I am in SL, and even shows you where I was
lets hope it works!
Posted from Second Life at:Nari 55.77996, 170.22108, 137.25417>
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test title
This is a simple one line test post from Second Life
Posted from Second Life at:Nari 55.77996, 170.22108, 137.25417>
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test title
test again
Posted from Second Life at:Nari 55.77996, 170.22108, 137.25417>>
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this Posted from Second Life
this
Posted from Second Life at:Nari 58.73904, 166.93364, 137.89986>>
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Blogging from SL
Did some work last night on a small app that would let me blog from SL. Basics are working fine (although I've deleted the test posts now). It even shows you the location you blogged from - although I'd like to create that as a dynamic SLURL. Other things to do are:
- Use the MetaBlogAPI extensions so I can post category and title
- add in a record feature so it will record SL conversations as they happen
- embed the script in a nice comms type bracelet.
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SLC - Burning Life 1
Started exploring Burning Life 06, the SL version of the Burning Man festival. First place was a giant sphere, and when you're inside it it projects 3D bubble photos onto the inside so that you appear stood or floating above some RL location. There was a city (Paris?), a coast (New England?), an opera house and many more.
The next was a small garden with fish swimming in the lake. When you clicked on a stone you were transported to this vast space, almost llike a planetarium with planets, stars and other everyday objects (table, bed etc), suspended in mid air.
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Thursday, 14 September 2006
Power Elite of SL
The Power Elite of Second Life, Part II - Kotaku
Beats the West Midlands Power 100!
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SLC - SL Chatbots
Managed to get Halo into SL. Very easy in the end. Just wrote an XML template for her to pick up on the web end, and then an LSL script to parse the XML being returned by the REST call. Added a few extra SL side functions like Say, Whisper, Channel, Be Quiet. Will also add some SL specific patterns to pick up on things like her location, who she's speaking too etc. Will be equally easy to get Charlotte and Lillian in.
The Nabaztag link is working very well. It's reporting probably half a dozen people a day coming into the office or up to the demo suite. The next step would be to get Halo to talk to them as they come in as well.
Between the RSS stuff and the chatbots there could be some real opportunities here.
Typing this just had a thought - would be good to be able to blog from within SL. And if only I can work out how to display text on a prim. Could do it at a prim per word I suppose. Perhaps some sort of scrolling display?
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Wednesday, 13 September 2006
Blind Date
What happens when two lonely hotbots get their wires crossed? Ikea's Anna talks to the US Armies SgtStar (or rather is jointly interviewed with him).
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Gapminder - World Development Dynamic Graphic
The Gapminder World 2006, beta
Cracking data visualisation tool. Just watch Southern Africa and Former USSR states buck the development trend.
The main Gapminder site is worth checking out too.
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wikiHow
wikiHow - The How-To Manual That Anyone Can Write or Edit
Nice idea, particularly with all the DIY I'm doing at moment at the cottage.
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Tuesday, 12 September 2006
Robot Mirai Department
%u30ED%u30DC%u30C3%u30C8%u30DF%u30E5%u30FC%u30B8%u30A2%u30E0 in %u540D%u53E4%u5C4B
The world's first end-user robot store?
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