Musings of the hippygeek

End of an era: New home page, blog, email address

2006-10-09T00:39:09Z

Homepage

I have a new homepage, it's http://tola.me.uk

Blog

Thanks LiveJournal for years of faithful service but it's time for me to fly the nest, if Drupal is good enough for Tim Berners-Lee then it's good enough for me.

You can add my new Drupal powered blog to your LiveJournal friends list by going here and clicking "Add this feed to your friends list" (thanks mchicago). For all other RSS readers, there is a feed here. If you don't want to syndicate all of it you can choose one of Personal, Technology, Art & Culture and Travel (they'll work better when there's something in them).

If anyone has successfully imported a LiveJournal blog into Drupal, please get in touch with me and tell me how!

Email Address

My new email address (for personal mail only) is ben at tola.me.uk (substitute the @ sign). Please don't enter it into any spammy social networking sites :)

The future of hippygeek.co.uk

http://hippygeek.co.uk has being going for five years now and it isn't going to disappear. The site will shortly be undergoing a transformation into hosting and a software repository for projects I'm working on.

mChicago: Content Negotiation

2006-10-06T19:26:13Z

As Advogato's trust metric does not appear to trust me enough to allow me to post a reply, this is in reply to mchicago's post about .Net and Browsercaps:

As someone who is currently in academia and will not qualify as an engineer for quite a while, I feel qualified to give you an unhelpful answer which has no practical application to your current real world problem.

Trying to keep up to date lists of every mobile device is like chasing the wind.

This is what Content Negotiation in the HTTP specification is for, in this case Server-driven negotiation would probably be preferable. A user agent should send an Accept header as part of the HTTP request which specifies which formats the user agent can render and the server should respond accordingly.

Unfortunately a lot of browsers send a wildcard instead of a real argument in Accept headers and claim to be able to render all formats, which of course they can't. Apache has partial support for Content Negotiation and if you're using IIS you'd probably have to write it yourself.

So the answer is to get manufacturers of mobile devices to get their web browsers to send proper Accept headers and Microsoft to think about Device Independence for their server products. Good Luck.

In other news...

tola.me.uk is nearly ready to roll, despite accidentally looking uncannily like Elliot's web site. That's what happens when you use stock themes! Once I've moved over, then hopefully interesting things will happen with hippygeek.co.uk

I've ordered a Nokia 770, I have evil plans for it.

Me and Sam spent several hours today trying to fix the BurnFM web stream, the web part is fixed but we can't get the sound engineering part right. I blame poor sound engineering kit. A poor worker always blames his tools. Sam's planning to swap out the server with one running slackware and icecast, I've almost convinced the station manager it's a good idea. 'Cept I vote for Ubuntu Server.

University are making me use Access :(

Now of to Tom's to see how many people we can fit in his house, I reckon about 130.

In between homes

2006-09-27T23:13:30Z

I've half moved into my new house in Birmingham with samwwwblack, Debs and Frankie and my parents are in the process of moving to Colsterworth. The day I moved half my stuff into my new house, I opened the front door to let my parents out and Big Man Paul (from school) walked past, weird coincidence. He's the first person I've met in Birmingham from school, though I'm sure there are others.

In other news...

I talked my way out of a £42 library fine today :)

BT Future Gazing: extremely smart yogurt, ultra simple computing

2006-09-27T23:03:56Z

"We did the calculations, and we reckon that it's possible to make a yoghurt with roughly the same processing power as the entire European population." --Ian Pearson, Futurologist: The ITWales Interview

The idea of "Ultra Simple Computing" appealed to me:

"Computers can be redesigned from the ground up with tens of thousands of little chips to distribute the load. It will mean there will be no need for an operating system or even a hard disk, as everything can be saved on the chips".

To me, a computer is just a network of networks of networks - right from a network of semiconductors on a chip up to a distributed supercomputer over a international stupid network like the Internet.

Drupal blogroll and blog import from LiveJournal

2006-09-23T12:25:05Z

I need some help with Drupal...

Import Blog from LiveJournal

I've asked this on Drupal forums but had no reply yet, so I thought I'd throw it to a wider audience.
I'd like to import nearly three years worth (219 entries) of my LiveJournal to my new Drupal powered blog. LiveJournal allow you to export entries as either CSV or XML files, a month of entries per file (that's 33 files for me).

There is a page entitled Migrating from LiveJournal on the Drupal web site, but I think it may be slightly out of date. It offers three methods of migration:

1) Use IFRAMEs - not really what I want
2) Using Node Import - by using an RSS feed it says that the actual content will still be hosted at LiveJournal, which isn't what I want. I think it's also now out of date because contrary to what it says, RSS feeds are now available to all LiveJournal users.
3) Use the Livejournal Module to import the raw data into Drupal - This sounds like the best method. Unfortunately, the module is no longer available or maintained.

I'm now thinking that my best option is to use the Node Import module to try and import the CSV or XML files, but I have no idea how to do it and the documentation for that module doesn't mention supporting the blog post content type. Alternatively, the new Import/Export API module might do this?

If I can use the Node Import module, What XML format do the blog posts need to be in to be imported and what date format do they need to use?

I don't think I will be able to preserve all LiveJournal features like "tags" because they don't appear in the exported XML files, but I'd quite like to convert all instances of a custom [lj user="joebloggs"] tag with an [a href="http://joebloggs.livejournal.com"] tag. This makes me wonder if I should somehow utilize the RSS feed of the blog which already has this conversion done, as well as other useful things like a link to the original LiveJournal post and comments.

If I have to write my own module to do this in Drupal 4.7, might this be a good use of XSLT? I've been meaning to play with that for a while.

Shaking that Ass, Bourne Grammar Style.

2006-09-23T07:49:00Z

It seems that the IT department are still the most fun people at Bourne Grammar School. Shaking that Ass, Bourne Grammar Style was recorded on non-uniform day by the "ICT Crowd". Look out for the teachers, including the entire IT department

I'm pleased to see that despite attempts of senior management to turn the place into a pompous public school, the BGS spirit still lives on!

eMusic UK

2006-09-20T16:40:33Z

eMusic UK has just lanched and I've been transferred from the US site to the UK one. This is bad because I now have to pay VAT on my subscription but good because I'm paying about £6.50/month for 40 songs and the new UK subscription price is £8.99 and... the new lineup of artists is awesome!

I just downloaded Arctic Monkeys and Bare Naked Ladies albums in high quality DRM-free mp3s, next month I think it'll be White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, Badly Drawn Boy... the list goes on.

Ask me to send you a referral email and subscribe to eMusic - support a music store which supports independent artists and sells DRM-free music for 17 to 22p a song.

They're not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but eMusic are some of the good guys.

A couple of random pictures

2006-09-18T16:13:43Z

This is half of the students who were on this year's Shell STEP programme. Spot the geek. Yes, that's right, the only guy not wearing a tie but proudly wearing his open source company's logo.

This is my new bike, and before you all accuse me of being sad, I didn't even choose it, the name is a pure coincidence.

wonchop.net and the future of hippygeek.co.uk

2006-09-17T13:22:07Z

wonchop.hippygeek.co.uk has a new home! Following his recent dazzling academic success, wonchop has launced a new site, wonchop.net which has a back catalogue of all his old animations, forums and a cafepress shop. Me and djkoa are lucky to have been the inspiration for the characters "b3n and wez - the IT geeks", two members of the wonchop family, and we've now even been made into t-shirts, mousemats and clocks! Go along to wonchop's cafepress shop and buy some merchandise (like I just have) to support his work :)

Wonchop was the first project to start off life nestled in the bosom of hippygeek.co.uk, back in 2003, and has now well and truly flown the nest. In this spirit, I hope that hippygeek.co.uk will be the home of lots more new ideas. Over the coming weeks I am going to be moving my personal homepage to the new Drupal powered tola.me.uk (still in its very early stages) and hippygeek.co.uk will solely become a home for new ideas, mainly providing trac hosting for software projects. The hosting for hippygeek has been kindly provided by FFDesign, and then Moose Computer Services up until now, but it will probably now move to its own Debian box, leaving tola.me.uk in its place.

Watch this space.

hippygeek @ 2006-09-12T01:25:00

2006-09-12T00:47:49Z

This mundane, plain English blog post is dedicated to bouncykaz.

I've finished my summer placement and am back home in Bourne, though "home" may soon be moving. My summer placement was spent writing web based business software for things like accounting and project management.

I spent today filling out a boring tax form, paying a cheque into the bank (yay!), and fine tuning my new bike. Then I visited a couple of houses, one in Colsterworth and one in Pointon, and then got my car started to go and see lauperr for a serious chat.

Unfortunately my main PC didn't survive the journey from Coventry and now has a dead hard disk, luckily it wasn't the hard disk with my half backed up important data on.

I'll be at home for about three weeks before heading back to uni. I need to sort out the Internet connection and visit samwwwblack before I go though, so a swift trip to Birmingham may be in order. I'm not looking forward to living in the new house as much as I was, having lived in lauperr's house for two months, it will just be like moving in all over again. Did I mention I'm doing a lot of moving around recently? Can't seem to stay in one place for very long.

Apart from that, I'm just sat here at 2 in the morning drinking Guinness.

Article in the Birmingham Post, Moving House

2006-09-02T11:23:26Z

Newspaper Article

There's an article about mine and Paul's summer placements with Senokian in the Birmingham Post, it's a good write up for Senokian and the dead tree newspaper version had a photo which made my head look really big.

My placement has officially ended but I'm stopping on for one more week next week. The new version of EGS is really starting to take shape and I have my final presentation on Tuesday (argh).

Moving

When I've finished in Coventry I'll be home for three weeks until term starts, mainly packing my life into boxes again. Only this time it's literally everything because not only am I moving into my new term time house in Birmingham but my parents are moving house about the same time. The house in Bourne has been sold (it was only on the market a few days) and if all goes to plan we'll be renting a cottage in Little Bytham. Bearing in mind that I've lived in Bourne all my life and so has my dad, it's really a big step (albeit only a 7 mile long step). I'm going to miss my custom built garage-conversion bedroom loads, but I really don't spend much time there these days. I don't spend much time in any one place these days.

PlusNet down, blame Telehouse power outage

2006-08-17T08:36:37Z

An announcement (not a permalink) from PlusNet says that their Broadband connectivity, Webmail, CGI, MYSQL, Some mail Relays and wait for it.... "The Phone System" are currently suffering downtime due to a power outage in Telehouse!

After the recent email data loss fiasco where I lost two years worth of email archives I'm starting to get a bit irritated. If I can't rely on telehouse for uptime, what can I rely on?

Three-dimensional Musings

2006-08-13T16:56:28Z

SecondLife

I finally managed to try out SecondLife last week (by transplanting all the best hardware I own into a single box so that I could run the thing!). Apart from slow rendering caused by the awful packet loss of my current Internet connection the experience has been a good one, it's cool. I can fly. I can build awesome objects with 3D modelling and logic.

Blender

I've downloaded and installed Blender, "open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback." It looks complicated, I really want to play with it but so far I've only had time to export a cube as X3D to see what the XML looks like. I know it's capable of great things.

Ajax3D

In December last year I blogged " X3D + AJAX = ...I wonder". Today I found Ajax3D, which was announced at the beginning of the month. I think it was started by the same people who make Flux, the X3D browser plugin, which I also want to play with.

and more...

I've been reading about 3D standards like X3D, OpenGL, KML etc. recently as part of my research into the multimodal web. I've also been thinking more about a RESTful and semantic web, separation of concerns, software design patterns like MVC, content negotiation, device independence, XML transformation etc. etc. I've started to try and channel all this thinking towards one or more actual software projects to work on and have started wrting stuff up. So many ideas, so little time.

Improving my paper writing skills

2006-08-04T11:48:15Z

I think it's interesting to compare the feedback from judges on my past two entries to Paper writing competitions...

2005 Entry:
The Judges felt that, although this entry was not of degree standard, it
contained a well developed argument with a clear purpose and a natural
flow, was interesting to read, with a good structure. On the whole the
Judges were impressed with this entry and the thorough research that had
gone into the essays production. The Judges noted that the topic was of
general and wide interest and, although the essay is not particularly
technical, it offers quite a grand vision and suggested that, with some
editing, the paper may be suitable for publication.

2006 Entry:

Well-written but without a great sense of interest or excitement
Good technical material (although a little dry for a general audience)
Figures not of a high quality.

I seem to have tipped the balance too far in the other direction this year after last year's feedback, next year I need to pitch it somewhere in the middle. Apparently this year's winner of the IET Write Around the World competition has entered for the past three years. If I can combine "good technical material" with "interesting to read" next time perhaps it could be my turn :)

RESTful URL design... and stuff

2006-08-03T21:41:09Z

I have a question about RESTful URLs which is going to sound pretty trivial and boring unless you're a RESTafarian... apparently they exist.

Say I have a resource with the URL http://widgets.com/widget/1 to which I can GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. If I want the user to have an overview of widget 1 they can GET this URL, similarly for DELETE. But if I want to point them to a form where they can edit the widget (which I don't necessarily want to display by default), what would a RESTful URL be?

http://widget.com/widget/1/edit ?
http://widget.com/widget/1?action=edit ?
http://widget.com/widget/edit/1 ?

What if I have a page which lists all my widgets, should that be
http://widget.com/widgets
or
http://widget.com/widget ?

There's an article on URI design by Timbl which contains lots of "don't"s but not many "do"s.

In other news...

I am furious with PlusNet for losing two years worth of emails I had stored on their IMAP server (along with everyone else's). I had "backup email" on my to do list for about a year, shame I relied on an ISP to back up my data. There were a lot of important emails in that inbox. I'm going to start looking into running my own mail server so at least if I lose data I know it's only my own fault. I've been meaning to play with Hula for ages but I've been waiting for their first stable release for over a year! They gave a talk at LugRadio Live and it sounds like the stable release is coming, but it's still going to be a while (I can't help but feel they've missed the boat a bit). I also have a book on Postfix which I might dig out.

Continuing in the theme of storing my own data, I've started on a new Drupal version of my now 5 year old homepage, which I plan to migrate my LiveJournal blog to if and when I figure out how to do it.

I found out that I didn't win the IET Write Around the World Competition again this year, no suprises there really. The judges' feedback boiled down to: well written, technically sound but boring as hell! I admit they have a point, I didn't like it myself once it was finished.

Summer Placement, LugRadio Live 2006

2006-07-24T20:35:06Z

Summer Placement

I've now been on my summer placement with Senokian Solutions for a week or so. We're working on version 2.0 of the Enterprise Groupware System. We've written the basics of the framework pretty much from scratch in a couple of weeks, it follows the Model View Controller design pattern and uses ADOdb database abstraction, the Smarty template engine and Simple Test unit testing amongst other free software projects.

Now that phase 1 of the framework is complete (pending the completion of unit testing) my job will shift focus to the ERP and accounting module. I'm mainly working with Greg who is leading the development of EGS 2.0 and Paul who is another summer placement student.

The office is cool (in both the froody and air conditioned senses of the word), we have a fridge full of free drinks, coffee machine and even an office dog called Archie! The development environment is Linux/Apache/Postgres/PHP with Subversion and Trac and Ubuntu thin client workstations with Firefox, Thunderbird et. al. Perfect.

LugRadio Live 2006

It's probably a bit late for these images but...

LugRadio Live was great! Bigger and better than last year for sure. There were a couple of very dull talks (especially for lauperr who actually fell asleep) but also a lot of very interesting ones. I particularly liked the talk by Simon Phipps from Sun who articulated the changing direction of the software market brilliantly in "The Zen of Open Source".

Poor old Jono lost his beard but raised about £600 for charity.

In other news...

I now finally have the Internet at home again (home as in temporary home in covernty) thanks to lauperr's cunning router configuration skills.

Summer placement with Senokian, LugRadio Live 2006, Ubuntu Dapper

2006-07-10T19:29:31Z

Summer Placement with Senokian

After a stretch of working in the fields picking vegetables (great money by the way) and desperate job searching I've managed to secure myself a summer placement! It's perfect in every way except that it's in Coventry. Luckily lauperr happens to be renting a house in Coventry and isn't having much luck finding a job at home so we're both going to live there for a couple of months and work. I'll be working for Senokian Solutions writing open source software and I assume contributing to the Enterprise Groupware System. I'll be part of the Shell Step program, though not eligible for any awards because it's only really meant for 2nd and 3rd years (shh!). I should be starting on Wednesday.

LugRadio Live 2006

For anyone who's still in the Bourne area I'll hopefully be back every weekend except next week when I'll be at LUGRadio Live 2006 in Wolverhampton. Be there or be... not square I suppose.

Ubuntu Dapper

I've spent about a week using the latest (long term support) release of Ubuntu Linux, Dapper Drake. I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a bold statement.

I believe GNU/Linux is now ready for the desktop.

Dapper Drake isn't perfect, but it's damned good and it's definitely easier to install than Microsoft Windows. That's understandable when you think how many years it is since Microsoft last released an operating system, but I believe that the perpetually delayed release of Windows Vista is going to alienate a lot of people, especially the minority who actually care about things like the Windows Genuine Disadvantage. I for one can't afford a PC which could run Vista and I'll probably only install it if I get a free copy from University. Dapper probably isn't as good in terms of usability or style as Mac OS X but it has its own advantages. I'm not saying that GNU/Linux is going to suddenly dominate the desktop, I'm just saying it's ready for use by the general public in ways it perhaps wasn't before the latest release of Ubuntu.

First Year Exam Results

2006-06-17T01:28:07Z

76.8% average.

w00t.

Post-exam partying in pictures

2006-06-15T21:43:36Z

This is an experiment with the camera(s) on my new Nokia N70 smartphone and with Flikr.

Since the end of my exams I've been partying like there's no tomorrow. Unfortunately the partying is coming to an end now that it's time to find a summer job and the money is running out. Here's a (not so) quick update on what I've been up to.

On the Vale

Laura and I on the Vale

After my exams Laura came to Brum to meet me, this is us sitting outside my flat sunbathing, this photo was taken with the lower quality VGA camera on the front of the phone (meant for video calls) so it's a bit grainy.

The Vale

I'm going to miss the Vale next year. This image onwards were taken with the main 2MP camera on my phone.

Bullring

Selfridges Building

We spent a day in the Bullring looking for a dress for Laura for my ball. This picture of the Selfridges building (and neighbouring church) shows that the camera isn't great in low light conditions. On some of the indoor pictures below I've adjusted the brightness and contrast in the GIMP.

Festivale

Entrance to Festivale

The Vale Festival or "Festivale" is now becoming an annual event. All proceeds from the festival went to Aids charities and the whole event is about students uniting against aids. This is the entrance to the festival with an archway setting the hippy-like theme for the festival.

Festivale Stage

This is the main stage for the festival before it got busy, apparently this stage was used at Glastonbury. The acts were all of brilliant quality and I'd heard of none of the bands before.

The Vale Lake

Here is the lake looking lovely and people starting to arrive.

Busy Festival

By late afternoon the festival was getting busy. It was soon realised that the recycling policy with separate bins was a brilliant idea but the bins provided were completely inadequate, lots of people produce lots of rubbish! There were places to eat including an awesome stall selling organic Indian style meals with bio-degradeable packaging and cutlery.

Festival Stage at Night

And then it got dark.

Small World Stage

There were several stages at the festival. This is the "Small World" stage with the University of Birmingham Jazz Band playing. There were rugs and cushions and a waft of narcotics in the air.

Juggling Fire

The battle re-enactment society and circus society took up residence at the festival, playing with dangerous things like swords and axes and fire. This was a group of circus people with fire staffs being artistic.

Outdoor Cinema

At 11pm there was an outdoor cinema showing "The Constant Gardner", continuing the Aids theme. It wasn't a film I would have chosen from a list to go and watch but it was an excellent and very moving film. You can just about make out the screen and streetlights reflecting on the lake in the background, not a bad setting for a cinema screen.

Summer Ball

Gladrags for the Ball

Here's me and Laura all dressed up for my Summer Ball. The ball was at the Birmingham Botanical gardens with a garden party theme.

Ball Meal

The £20 ticket included a coach to the venue, Pimms reception, three course meal (with a party bag full of sweets, bubbles and comemorative condom!), jazz band playing during the meal, four free drinks, casino chips, giant connect-4 and jenga, air hockey and arcade games, free photo and performance from Bodger and Badger and Pat Sharp from Funhouse! What a deal. This was the room where our meal was served by a small army of waiters.

And she had a rose in her hair

Here's Laura, just having stolen a rose from the display on the table. I like this photo.

Bodger and Badger

The £20 ticket included a coach to the venue, Pimms reception, three course meOh the hilarity, mashed potato all over the place. I've never been so entertained and patronised at the same time before. Nostalgia is a powerful thing.

Laura and Pat Sharp

This photo didn't come out brilliantly in the low light but it's Pat Sharp from Funhouse hugging Laura. She also told him he was a legend, that he should grow back his mullet and pinched his bum.

Back Home for Mr M's Leaving Do

Bodger and Badger

Back at home in Bourne I first spent a lot of time sunning myself in the garden, this is my daft cat Rue.

Captured Blue-footed Booby

Me and Laura captured a live Blue-footed Booby in my garden in this cage.

Tamed Blue-footed Booby

We then tamed the creature so that it wouldn't run away. This is actually a bizarre creation we came up with as a leaving present for Mr M's leaving do. We had a meal and went back to Mr C's for drinks, I had a brillant time and it made me realise how much I miss everyone.

Bourne Festival

Sunset over Bourne Festival

Next was Bourne Festival where I spent time with family, met cousins I've not seen for years and caught up with schoolfriends.

Ride of Doooom

My crazy mum went on this ride at the festival.

Bourne Festival Stage

The lineup of bands at the festival wasn't as good as usual but much local real ale was drunk and much fun was had. This is Legend, one of my favourite local bands, who finished off on Sunday night.

Exhibition

iPod Painting

Before coming home I went to a public exhibition at my brother's college to see his "sensory room" and to look at everyone else's work. I don't have any photos of his work, they may come later, but I particuarly liked this picture by another student.

Back in Brum for more partying

Snobs Nightclub

Back in Brum I chucked on some gladrags and walked to Broad Street, found Tom, went to a couple of pubs, got lost for a bit and then went to Snobs nightclub on my own. I got talking to some people in the queue which was good beacuse the 30 minute wait would otherwise have been very dull. I met people from my block and made some new friends and basically had a brillaint time.
Tomorrow is results day, probably shortly followed by more pubs and partying until the early hours. My family are coming to Brum for the weekend for me to show them around and then it's back home for the summer.

Btw, in conclusion, the camera on my phone is amazing but struggles in low light and suffers slightly from its fixed focus. Flickr is OK, but the blogging feature is rubbish because you can only blog one photo at a time so I ended up coding all this by hand.

hippygeek @ 2006-05-31T19:04:00

2006-05-31T18:13:25Z

tola: well I went to see the cookie monster and he said he marked them three weeks ago
tomleech: i dont think the cookie monster is one of our lecturers
tomleech: you may be confused between real life and a childrens program

Today in an exam when asked how to increase the range of a transmitter given certain conditions, I wrote "hold on to the antenna and wave your arms around in the air".

You can tell its towards the end of the exam period, I may be joining bouncykaz in a padded room shortly.

Exam Stress

2006-05-30T02:39:43Z

Argh! I've so far managed to almost completely avoid talking about exams on my blog, but no longer.

It will all be over by 3:30pm Thursday, and that's what worries me.

Where does all the time go? I seem to have lost three days to some freak illness during which I have slept lots, sweated lots, dreamt lots of weird dreams and achieved very little.

It doesn't help that I have a paper deadline, job seeking, late student loan application and house contract signing looming over me.

Must stay focussed. Not sure what to do about my messed up body clock. Do I give in to it and work until 4:30am another night or try and fight it into some kind of sane rhythm which actually involves seeing daylight?

Google Co-op, Notebook, Trends

2006-05-25T13:40:04Z

All those fed up of hearing about Google, look away now.

In the Google Newsletter today were a few useful tools I didn't know existed.

Co-op - Another way of getting users to help organise the world's information

Notebook - Basically a wiki for Joe Public, you can have private or public notes. The intereting bit is "AJAX" UI for inline WYSIWYG editing, pretty much exactly what I meant by my WizziWiki idea on my ideas wiki.

Trends - An incredibly useful tool (for some people) for graphing search trends on just about anything - kind of a build-your-own zeitgeist. For example, Good vs. Evil

Google SoC: Rejected :(

2006-05-24T10:44:26Z

My applications:

Drupal Admin Client

MediaWiki Exporter

MythWeb UI Redesign

.mobi, homebrew mobile phones, Gumstix

2006-05-24T01:43:08Z

.mobi

The .mobi TLD was launched on Monday. This is good because it is promoting the (currently struggling) mobile web, but bad because I think it's the wrong direction. Why have separate domains for the mobile web than for the desktop web? We shouldn't be making assumptions about how people are accessing our web pages. I think that web pages should be in a device independent language which can be transformed to be rendered in different formats (see previous post). It's an issue of properly separating content and presentation, not of marketing.

Homebrew Mobile Phone Club

Following in a similar theme, I recently discovered the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club who work on open mobile platforms (with, I think, the ultimate goal of creating their own mobile phones.) They share the frustration that I have for the current range of available mobile phones. My frustration is that I know exactly what I phone I want, it just hasn't been invented yet!

Gumstix

And to finish off, take a look at these awesome little Linux computers, the size of a stick of chewing gum.
Gumstix. There is lots of development support and a range of expansion kits.

"Device Independent Authoring Language", how about a "Device Independent Web Server"?

2006-05-20T02:20:24Z

DIAL

Thanks to an anonymous poster for pointing me towards the first public release of a working draft for the W3C's Device Independent Authoring Language. This was released by the Device Independence Working Group four days ago.

DIAL may possibly be the UIDL (User Interface Description Language) I've been looking for. It does seem to be quite content focussed rather that UI focussed like something like UIML, but it might do the job. Being W3C recommendation will be a huge bonus. It is based on elements from existing xml formats like XHTML(2) but also XForms, which has some very interesting features. (see the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (not W3C) for an alternative take.)

RFC: Device Independent Web Server

Suggestion:

Each web "page" is stored on the server as a DIAL document. A page is requested by its name and a client-specified extension (e.g. .xhtml, .svg, .x3d, .voicexml, .xul), usually with an HTTP GET. The server first performs any server-side scripting, then performs a server-side transformation on the output using XSLT with an XSL stylesheet to return a document in that format. If a stylesheet for the requested extension does not exist, a .dial document is passed to the client which can attempt to perform a client-side transformation or return an error.

Questions:

Could this same DIAL document also be bound/translated/tranformed into a GTK or similar user interface using something other than XSLT?

Could an XMLHTTPRequest type request be sent to the server and the server return a fragment which is either pre-transformed on the server or transformed on the client into a suitable format?

Is this RESTful?

DISCLAIMER: I have been drinking whisky

Musings of the hippygeek

End of an era: New home page, blog, email address

Homepage

Blog

Email Address

The future of hippygeek.co.uk

mChicago: Content Negotiation

In other news...

In between homes

In other news...

BT Future Gazing: extremely smart yogurt, ultra simple computing

Drupal blogroll and blog import from LiveJournal

Blogroll Friends list Block

Import Blog from LiveJournal

Shaking that Ass, Bourne Grammar Style.

eMusic UK

A couple of random pictures

wonchop.net and the future of hippygeek.co.uk

hippygeek @ 2006-09-12T01:25:00

Article in the Birmingham Post, Moving House

Newspaper Article

Moving

PlusNet down, blame Telehouse power outage

Three-dimensional Musings

SecondLife

Blender

Ajax3D

and more...

Improving my paper writing skills

RESTful URL design... and stuff

In other news...

Summer Placement, LugRadio Live 2006

Summer Placement

LugRadio Live 2006

In other news...

Summer placement with Senokian, LugRadio Live 2006, Ubuntu Dapper

Summer Placement with Senokian

LugRadio Live 2006

Ubuntu Dapper

First Year Exam Results

Post-exam partying in pictures

On the Vale

Bullring

Festivale

Summer Ball

Back Home for Mr M's Leaving Do

Bourne Festival

Exhibition

Back in Brum for more partying

hippygeek @ 2006-05-31T19:04:00

Exam Stress

Google Co-op, Notebook, Trends

Google SoC: Rejected :(

.mobi, homebrew mobile phones, Gumstix

.mobi

Homebrew Mobile Phone Club

Gumstix

"Device Independent Authoring Language", how about a "Device Independent Web Server"?

DIAL

RFC: Device Independent Web Server