Grasshoppermind

New scientist has this old article about MyLifeBits, a piece of software designed so that you can record your life. You can store conversations, emails, video, etc. A google style indexing system gives you the ability to search back through your life archive.

Since 2002 when the article was written, we have much cheaper storage, mini video cameras, HSDPA and locative based technologies that are enabling a greater degree of granularity for recording than ever before. Allowing indexing by date, time, location, people. The security and privacy concerns are also greatly elevated by this type of application.

You can find out more about the project at Microsoft’s Project Page for MyLifeBits

Back in November 2005 Manx Telecom announced their plans to rollout one of the first HSDPA networks in the world. Those of you who read this blog will be aware of my interest in all things geo and map based. So naturally I was interested in being able to be online at broadband speeds anywhere I went. I went to a demonstration of the technology last week and although it doesn’t work too well within steel framed buildings (faraday cage effect?) the performance outdoors is superb.

BUT

according to one of the slides I saw at the presentation, the coverage and speeds available away from urban areas fade away to nothing. So the idea of being on-line at the top of a mountain, broadcasting geolocated live video feed straight to the net is a little way off yet.

However the target market for this type of technology is largely urban based, so I can forsee developers making use of the extra bandwidth to get very creative with their video/map based mashups.

I just heard about the latest release of the Wordpress 2.0.1 blogging platform.
I moved to Wordpress a while back because it is so simple to maintain and I love the way the plug-ins just drop in. I’m especially fond of Spam Karma2 which I use to deal with the Comment SPAM I started getting soon after I was up and running. There’s also a new release of Spam Karma2 available so I’ll have to spend an evening some time soon getting this up and running. From what I’ve heard so far it’s a pain free experience.

I really want my new Dell laptop, like now please! It’s been two weeks already. I’ve had no emails keeping me up to date. Your order tracking system is so broken you should take it off line. It’s embarrassing! From their tracking page…

Please note
NB It can take up to 72 hours for the data to transfer from our ordering system to the online status tool. As a result do not be alarmed if within this timescale no record is found, simply wait 48-72 hours and try again.

Erm Why? UPS seem to be able to track status pretty well. So do DHL and FedEx. I just want to find out where my laptop is. Oh and on Saturday and Sunday the customer service office is closed.

Rant, Rant, etc.

Following up on the Sony Rootkit story, as predicted there is already significant fallout for Sony. There are Lawsuits filed against them, Virus writers are exploting the cloaking technology that was employed, Sony’s own patch appears to cause stability problems and now the anti-virus vendors are releasing removal tools. All in all this has been no doubt been a very interesting week for Sony’s PR department! If they want to do further damage to their reputation they can press ahead with the release of this copy protection scheme in Europe.

As of the time of writing there is no official press release from Sony about this, you can check here at Sony’s official press release area.

The Isle of Man has received the first commercial HSDPA network in Europe allowing islanders to download at speeds of up to 1.4Mbps. But that is of course just the start as the network is upgradeable and as such they could be seeing speeds of 10Mbps by 2008! [From 0Gravity]

The Isle of Man was also one of the first countries with a 3G network. It’s size and easy access to UK lends itself well to small technology trials of this nature. Let’s hope that the proposed takeover by Telefonica does not stop this from taking place.

Mark Russinovich who runs Sysinternals has posted an outstanding example of computer forensics. After discovering a Rootkit on one of his own computers, he set out to determine how it got there. The cause of his problem? He played a copy protected CD (from Sony) in his computer. It turns out that Sony’s implementation of the DRM copy protection scheme breaks computer misuse laws in several countries! I suspect that the fallout from this story is going to cause a huge problem now for Sony. Go and have a read of the comments on his post and you’ll see what I mean.

Oh dear, comment SPAM, *sigh*. Hopefully this is a sign of the extreme popularity of my blog!

Anyway, thanks again to Jacko at Tuazon who pointed me at Spam Karma 2. This is a pretty comprehensive Spam killer plugin for Wordpress users. Initial thoughts are: Wordpress plugin technology is brilliant, Spam Karma 2 is pretty comprehensive and looks very well put together. Now all I need is some more comment SPAM to test it on. bwa ha ha ha ha ha!

Now I know why the google bot was sucking up my bandwidth!
Google’s Blog Search looks pretty good, and the entries are pretty much up to date. In Web 2.0 fashion you can subscribe to your search terms via RSS or ATOM like Technorati.

Although you probably won’t see any differences to the content here, I have been making use of the W3c validation service to tidy up some of my recent postings. Cutting and pasting information can sometimes lead to bad HTML that won’t render correctly in some browsers. Using the validation service highlights those errors in the markup of your site that require attention. It’s good practice and helps to develop your HTML skills.

And one of them is not buying into Google’s IPO. Doh!

Google’s continued attempt at World Domination has seen the launch of yet another beta product, Google Talk. I’ve been testing this out with Jacko from Tuazon. You need a gmail address to try it out. I’ve got plenty of Gmail invites left so leave a comment if you want to give it a go as well.

Sheesh, migrating from MSN Spaces to here has been rather more difficult than I thought. Copy, edit, publish, copy, edit, publish, and so on. Good job I only started blogging on July 1st 2005!

At least now I’m on a decent platform I shouldn’t have to move again anyway…

Quick response to security advisories from the developers of Wordpress. Secunia highlighted this flaw on 11th Aug 2005, Wordpress version 1.5.2 was released on 14th Aug 2005.

Weblogs Work quickly bashed out this article for managed weblogs. Whilst I agree that managed weblogs are going to work well for some businesses, they are using FUD to promote the idea. Personally I don’t think this is the best way to market anything.

OK, simpletags was so simple to add, I didn’t even try the other one. So seeing as how I had some unexpected time free I made a start on customising the look of the blog by hacking the CSS as well.

I have found technorati to be extremely useful for categorising and indexing the content on my pages. But at the moment I have to hand code these at the bottom of each post. Tiresome.

So I will be trying out the bunny’s technorati tags and simple tags plugins for Wordpress. I’ll let you know how I get on.

tags: technorati grasshoppermind wordpress plugin

I registered www.kdrmedia.com with joker.com at a cost of $24 for two years registration. I have used Joker for a while now and I find them easy to use and their services are well priced.

www.crystaltech.com for hosting (standard shared hosting). $7.95 setup then $7.95 per month.

Wordpress selected as blogging platform following recommendation from my friends at Tuazon. Wordpress is free, simple to install and has a good community behind it.

My time spent researching and setting this up? All told probably about 10 hours so far. Now that I’ve been through it once I can save you some time if you’re interested.

Tags: wordpress grasshoppermind joker crystaltech blogging

I found ElfURL last week and at first I almost dismissed it as a “me too” clone of TinyURL. I’m so glad I read a little further into their blurb. This is a great little utility!
you can :
- Take a big URL and make it smaller.
- Create del.icio.us tags
- Create REL tags
- Each time a link is used it is counted and you can retrieve stats on that link via RSS.

I can think of several good uses for this.
Marketing: use an ElfURL signature on your email to link to your website/blog - use the Elf RSS feed to measure effectiveness of clickthroughs from your email.
Geotagging: create an ElfURL of any webpage article and Geotag it.

Any others spring to mind? Let me know.