ISS tracking

Ace, we can track the International Space Station in real time!

Domestic Tame Pet Fox

Ever wondered how Dogs and Cats were tamed? Well a CCCP Scientist Dmitri Belyaev wondered that too. He was able to selectively pick friendly silver foxes and over 10 successive generations he bread a tame fox which barked, wagged it's tail, had floppy ears and even had spots on its coat like a dog! For more info: tame fox videos, BBC scientists breed cute tame fox article.

It's pretty amazing the change happened so quickly!

No more Apple iTunes excuses

I've long argued against using Apple's proprietary DRM beast that is iTunes, but I still know people who put up with the DRM and other problems because they like the UI. Now we have Miro, the free software media player which is fortunately a Joost killer. Also we have Songbird, this will suit those still using Apple's iTunes.

A few years ago i saw that VLC was popular, but not mainstream in the way that Firefox had become. We've needed a media player which can complete for a long time, and now we have two! What's a shame is that they both advocate Adobe's Flash format on their screencast pages here and here, that's a bit bad form after your great effort guys!

I myself am still using XMMS, loads in under 1 sec and doesn't take up much screen space. I'd give KDE's Amarok a go, but it takes 6 secs to load! eek.

3D on the web (VRML, X3D and COLLADA)

3D on the web is one area that is still absent, I'd like to see that change over the next couple of years, especially as the tech has been around since the 90s. We've got the open format VMRL and X3D, which via the script tag support Javascript code. There is the Sony Computer Entertainment COLLADA format which is now maintained by the Khronos Group.

So to pull it all together browsers really need to add native support for these formats. While their are "plugins" such as the excellent OpenVRML that is still just a plugin, and not an integrated component of the browser like SVG or HTML. Perhaps someone at an innovative net business would be what's needed now to get things rolling.

AOL moving to Jabber (XMMP)

Looks like AOL has seen the writing on the wall and is experimenting with XMPP for it's instant messaging services (ICQ and AIM). Check out this post with more info. This is great news for the users still on their networks (many switched to MSN), the rest of us went straight to a jabber.org account, or a GoogleTalk as that is already XMPP.

So finally it looks like IM is converging on a decent open standard. Better than a fractured proprietary system with each vendor hoping for a monopoly (like Betamax!). Now all we need is for MSN to addopt XMPP, or maybe all the users will just ditch it and use GoogleTalk or Facebook when they switch to Ubuntu? ;)

BBC-B in UoSAT-2 launch video

Not exactly 20 years ago today.. but this UoSAT-2 video is pretty cool anyway. Check out the BBC-B in the video!. The Major Tom sound track is pretty ace too :)

Safer online payment system

I figure a better way of paying online. Rather than having to give up my Mastercard details and check digits to every website, why can't i simply login on the Mastercard website (or other means via my mobile etc), create a transaction ref, and enter that into the online shopping website? Save's the risk of someone on that site of deciding to use my card details for anymore than the transaction ref amount ;)

Do you find yourself highlighting text?

I read a lot of PDFs and webpages, but what strikes me is the colour schemes are often unsuitable for reading. Take the standard black text on white background, there has been research showing that applying a blue or other filter to the page makes the tones easier to see and thus easier to read. At present I find myself highlighting the text to give it a blue highlight rectangle!

So.. now we just need an easy way to change PDFs and webpages colour schemes to fit what we want. Its not difficult, so someone will do it eventually.. just like I've done custom userContent.css code to remove adverts we could change the colours. Perhaps even Greasemonkey can do it.. ah, yes we have Page recolourisation just what I was thinking!

Google Analytics "urchin" cookie tracking

While testing my site earlier I noticed cookies called __utma, __utmb, __utmc and __utmz being set from jguk.org, what was worse was that they lasted until 23 Nov 2007, and had unique numbers in them, like 98208771.

I've found out that they orginated not from my site, but from "http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js". This was a free google service I signed up to but couldn't get anything useful out of it as it was using proprietary Adobe Flash files for its display. I already have an http://extremetracking.com/ button visible and a hit counter, so I've fallen back to using that. (These services aren't perfect though, e.g. they record screen size not current browser window size!)

I've removed the code that was setting these unreasonable cookies (practice what I preach eh?), and I suggest you all clear out your cookies from my domain, and consider if you want to clear out these __utm* cookies from other domains too. Another way of achieving the same result is to use the Customise Google extension to Firefox!

Urchin can track every single click on a webpage if the developer sets it up like that, they just add something to the onclick param of the anchor tag like this:

onClick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/directory/file.html");"

It could even be used to see what links people hovered over with by adding the function call to the onMouseOver param.

It's intrusive use of features like this which ruin it for the rest of us who love webpages which are javascript enabled (AJAX etc!). This is going to make people want to selectively block Javascript for certain sites, and then those sites may not function well enough.

Other sites have the same problem, take Ian Brown's Blogzilla as but one example, should anyone really be using Google urchin tracking!?

UK fibre broadband

The UK Government is considering fibre broadband assistance. The thing is, we've been lagging behind Korea and Japan for some years now on this front. I'm sure it would drive our economy forward if we had 100 mbit/sec connections in each home! Certain areas have VirginMedia cable, which can offer up to these speeds, but without competition in the marketplace they don't really have any reason to ramp up!

C++0x and Overview

Just watched C++0x and Overview, interesting talk by Bjarne Stroustrup. Worth a watch, and good to see a Theora version of the video :) Adding std::breakpoint() would be one of my library feature wishes, to allow better integration with debuggers in a cross-platform way (raising a SIGTRAP signal); along with symbol name look-up and demangling like the GNU/Linux glibc linker/loader supports (dladdr). Shame we have to wait to 2009 though! nullptr keyword has got to be good though, definitely better than the current NULL defined in header solution (which is also an int 0!).

Scaling P2P for the future

We all use P2P like BitTorrent, but the user experience isn't quite there yet. The current generation of P2P doesn't scale from popular to niche downloads. Often we'll be sat waiting hours or even days for a niche track to download, and likewise my potential for uploading will be left unused as no one needs parts of the tracks I have.

The solution is for the super-nodes to hint the niche files which are struggling to be cached by other nodes, boosting the niche file's availability while the other nodes are otherwise idle; a neat balancing trick. Skype uses similar approaches, diverting firewalled traffic via idle nodes.

The story of when Sergey Brin met Larry Page

If you've not already read the excellent article on Sergey Brin I can recommend it. It talks about his family, background, their life in Soviet Russia, immigration to the US, being Jewish, where he was educated. Also how he met Larry Page and the moment he came up with the idea of ranking based on citations (i.e. Links). The rest as they say is history. Oh and Chernobyl Chili -- "45 minutes in the microwave." sounds yum!

I remember the moment when I was first introduced to Google search by a friend back in spring 1999, it was amazing compared to the other search engines I had plugged away with until then. The key is to make money out of ideas though, and Google have done that so well with AdSense, because the ads are integrated with the results people click them, and I know from experience I'm often looking to buy a product anyway!

The Inside Look at Google video shows what a great working environment they have there. This all leads me to wonder if the UK could foster such entrepreneurial success? We don't have quite such an environment of innovation and pushing the next generation I feel; things are improving though all the time though. I would love to see more Colleges and Universities helping start-up companies get off the ground and do innovative stuff with technology. Doing all the existing Desktop feature set on mobile is one big area which will be filled over the next 5-10 years -- why not make it our own destiny to full fill that?

This interview with Google's Marissa Mayer is really interesting too.

So thanks for doing search so well Google, and more fun times ahead!

How about an open mobile phone platform sir?

Mobile phones have come a long way in the last 10 years in the UK. I remember when my friend got his first analogue mobile back in 1995 and how impressed I was! I've got a K800i myself now, it's the CyberShot 3MP camera model. A really impressive feature set over the K700i I had. The K800i's screen is bigger, web browser renders clearer in anti-aliased fonts and it even has an M2 memory card slot, hungry for MP3s and photos - going to be great rocking to some fab tunes on the ski slopes with this phone come new year ;) Now all the French Alps need is a snowfall!

There are a few things which could be improved though. The stability and reliability isn't perfect; PhotoDJ crashed while saving my edited photo, and it even crashed when I added Nite (langue à la mode?) to my words list! Interestingly it auto-restarts when it crashes, also restarts when engaging file transfer mode, it could just be rebooting into "File Transfer" mode though?

Now what would be cool is if Sony published the source code, I'd love to get the opportunity to write some features for this phone. Here are a few ideas I've had :-
General:

• Integrated search box on main GUI of the phone, which searches with Google.
  
• Modify Camera View and PhotoDJ to make the Zoom function always accessible.
• Optimise Next Word Prediction, a cool feature, but too slow to be usable at present.

Compose message features:

• Add a way to set the Subject on TXT and MMS messages.
• Revise the input mode to not switch the last letter to CAPS when I switching from abc to Abc input.
• Add a some words to the dictionary and share the list online, Blog and Nite etc. (or use the Mozilla dict?)
  
• Keep the order of msg in Drafts, at present it changes when they are viewed.
• In the Web browser jump into input mode when a key is pressed (need to press Edit each time atm).
• Know that peoples' names and cities first letter should be capitalised.
  

Past use statistics:

• Address book search using past usage stats, like I mentioned in 2004. Also stats for non dictionary words, just add them automatically to a local list.
  
• Unify and sort the extended character list by their usage frequency, atm there are two different orders in use on different dialogs in the phone!

Add Contact dialog:

• When you meet someone and get their mobile number you always enter the number first and then the name; so the Add Contact dialog should highlight that field first!
• Know that 079* is a mobile number, and add it as that rather than Home in the Address book.

Finally, I know mobile phone companies make money out of chargers and other accessories to cover their discounted phones, but it would be sooo much simpler if phones cost slightly more and had standard connectors. USB, headphone jack and charger connectors are pretty much standard on other devices, but even between my Sony models the connectors change! Korea and now China are leading the field with standardised mobile charger and USB sockets; they are even mandating USB chargers! Now we just need a standard headphone/handsfree/music player control port ;)

A positive development is the announced Linux-based Motorola Rokr E2, it shuns the 100 song limit Apple hobbled the Rokr E1 with to "protect" their iPod music player market. The more open and DRM-free approach of the E2 looks v.promising; let's hope it gets released eventually. Many interesting things forward to in the mobile arena, I can't wait ;)

Considering Humax 9000T DVR

Humax Digital UK have launched the 8000T DVR (Digital Video Recorder). This supports FreeView (DVB-T) services and included a 40GB HDD. However, it does not have an ethernet port or a DVD writer. All DVR should have network connectivity and backup to DVD functions. I own a Panasonic DMRE85HEBS DVR DVD/HDD. This has an 80 GB drive and can record to DVD-R. It does not have an ethernet port or DVB decoder, which lets it down. It also has built in CPRM (Content Protection for Recordable Media), this is a form of DRM (Digital Restrictions Managment). The Register - Everything you ever wanted to know about CPRM, but ZDNet wouldn't tell you… gives a good overview.

The Humax 8000T, while not open and not running GNU/Linux like Freevo and MythTV, does have a thriving upgrade community: Humax 8000T upgrade forum, Humax 8000T HDD upgrade discussion and Humax 8000T Firmware upgrade discussion.