Journeys in XML

My Wife: [looks over my shoulder at the laptop screen]
What's XHTML? I know HTML but I haven't heard of this one.

Me: Well, it's sort of designed to be a replacement for HTML. It's a bit tidier and stuff like that.

MW: What does the 'X' stand for?

Me: Oh, that stands for XML - Extensible Markup Language. It's a form of HTML that complies with XML standards.

MW: Oh, okay. [pause] Umm, doesn't 'Extensible' start with an 'E'?

Me: Yep.

MW: So where does the 'X' come from?

Me: It comes from XML - Extensible Markup Language.

MW: You said that. But why is there an 'X' if 'Extensible' starts with an 'E'?

Me: [long pause] You see, the 'X', right, it stands for 'Extensible'.

MW: But, but, Extensible starts with an 'E'!

Me: Yes.

MW: [frustrated pause]

Me: Ooh, and see this knob? It goes all the way up to 11!

Storage robot? Want!

I first saw a video of Drobo in action a couple of months ago. The Ars Technica review of Drobo just confirms for me that I really, really, really wish that I had the spare cash to throw at this little bad boy robot.

Go convergence!

I am currently sitting on the bus in a 4 seat arrangement - two seats facing each other. At various times, at least one of the four people is tapping away at their mobile phone. At one stage, all four of us were. A quick look around the bus showed this was far from unusual. I am amazed at how ubiquitous there things have become.

I bet I am the only one moblogging though.

I've never been so proud...

That's my boy. I'll make a geek of him yet.

Citizen cartography

A career in cartography used to be the prerogative of well-funded adventurers — men like Rennell or Lewis and Clark — with full government backup ... Now, suddenly, mapmaking power is within the grasp of a 12-year-old.

- Wired: Google Maps is changing the way we see the world

I use Google Maps almost on a daily basis, particularly when trying to find the location of specific rural services. The ability to quickly locate remote locations is becoming invaluable to me.

In fact, a work-related mapping project popped in to my head which could be quite useful in informing some upcoming policy development and review processes. I wouldn't have been able to do this 12 months ago, yet alone two, three or five years ago.

Once again I find myself thinking that it is an amazing time to be alive right now, where geographically disparate chunks of information can be collated and visualised with a few clicks of the mouse.

Program your own console

This is so cool - the Hydra console game dev kit from Thinkgeek, which allows you to program your own console games.

Seems like the perfect summer holiday project for me and the boy in about 10 years time.

Via Boing Boing - [permalink]

Speaking of touch screens...

Technically, I haven't been speaking of touch screens because, as I mentioned in a previous post, Surface isn't a touch screen but is camera controlled. However...



Dave Wallin, the brains behind WhiteNoiseAudio, purveyors of some damn fine VSTi soft synths (Disclaimer: I'm a proud owner of Zero Vector, Additive and Doppelmangler), has been hard at work for quite a while developing the Touchlib library for multi-touch surfaces as well as his own DIY prototype touch surfaces.

It doesn't appear as slick as Surface, but the sheer geeky hackery to get it work to my mind makes it that much cooler.

Awesome work, Dave. Score another one for the little guys.

Twitter hits the mainstream...

...just as I'm about to wave goodbye to it.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a three page article on Twitter, the latest darling of the hyped-up 2.0 set.

This amuses me as, once again, I'm stepping off a bandwagon just as the mainstream media picks up on it. I was curious about Twitter for a number of reasons, including because it was new, it revelled in its simplicity but also because it was the latest brainwave of Evan Williams, the creator of Blogger, before it was assimilated by Google.

Ultimately, I just didn't really get Twitter. Maybe it was because I didn't have any actual friends, real or virtual, who used the service. In the end it became almost like a micro-rss reader as I slowly stopped updating my own account but kept reading a handful of others. It hasn't helped that Australian users were denied SMS access while Twitter changed the UK number it recommended we use, while at the same time it seemed like the Twitter servers were down every other day. Scaling up can be a hassle sometimes, I guess.

So now I'm on that other great micro-blogging hype machine, Jaiku. Jaiku is similar, but has more features such as comments and "channels" (kind of like an old-school irc channel with a shiny 2.0 interface) and, to me, a stronger feeling of community.

*shrug*

I might just as likely drop Jaiku as quickly as I've let Twitter slide. Half of the fun is trying out new things so it won't be time wasted, even if it wasn't time spent being productive.

Are you being served?

If you're wondering where I have been for the last week and a bit, I have been researching and writing lecture notes and some lab exercises on the Apache web server for my sys admin subject.

The fruits of my labour are here [pdf]. The notes contain minor modifications from the lecturer, but 95% is my work. I don't have all of my original work as I wrote big chunks of it on the internal wiki that this subject uses.

I put a lot of effort into this assignment so I hope I do okay results-wise.

Love, Jaiku style

I took a 5 minute break from reading lecture notes to cruise past my Jaiku contacts, only to discover that their servers are temporarily overloaded as I was greeted with this:



I love "Server down" messages that remind us geeks that there are other, better things they could be doing right now.

Of course, I could chat with someone I love, but her Gmail chat icon is on "idle", so by the time she saw my message, I would be back to my lecture notes and the moment would have passed.

What do you mean wrong "chat"?

A new low?

Instant messaging a virtual kiss to my wife on the computer less than 15 metres away, instead of just getting up and kissing her for real?

Oh yes, that is a new low for me. For her too, as she IM'd one back ;>

Wireless. Aw. Yeah.

After substantial faffing about, some swearing and all round "Why did you just click apply? Are you mad?", I finally have the beginnings of a home wi-fi network happening.

The desktop is connected to my new Billion wireless router/ADSL2+ modem, I've got sync speeds close to 10Mb/s and I'm feeling deliciously geeky.

Next challenge is to get my Dell laptop running Vista connected wirelessly, closely followed by seeing if I can get Ubuntu Server running inside VirtualPC to connect (I know, using a VM to run Linux is a bit twisted, but it's part of one of my subjects so I quite frankly, I feel good about it).

When all that is up and running, I'll attempt my first phonecall using the Nodephone VOIP service (it's more voice over private network rather than your typical voice over IP service, but for 18c untimed calls to any landline in Australia, it still speaks to the cheap bastard within me).

Yes. I feel the geek within growing stronger every day.

I think my brain just asploded

Had my first Operating Systems lecture this evening.

Processes, registers, synchronous, threads...

First assignment will involve coding (not one of my specialties) and although the lecturer will reluctantly accept Java (the only coding I have done in any sort of detail), he has a strong preference for C/C++. The dumb thing there is that the only pre-requisite subject was Introduction to Programming which focused on, you guessed it, Java.

Gah.

This semester is going to be a hard one.

Brainy Fish
Originally uploaded by philigran. Used under a Creative Commons licence.

Remember, FLOSS is good for you

If you'll excuse me a quiet fan-boy moment, I just want to share my joy that my favourite podcast, FLOSS Weekly, is back on the air after a long hiatus! W00t!

For those who don't know, FLOSS (or Free/Libre Open Source Software) is a podcast hosted by Chris DiBona (lately of Google as their Open Source Manager)) and Leo Laporte (This Week in Tech etc) where leading lights in the open source community are interviewed.

FLOSS is my favourite tech podcast for two reasons:

1. they interview people who have contributed in a meaningful way, which is most definitely not restricted to the code monkey types. For example, they have interviewed Hemos and CmdrTaco, founders of Slashdot, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Eben Moglen, lead counsel law-talkin' guy for the Free Software Foundation; and
2. most recently they've talked to an Australian (Jeff Waugh, who did a lot of organisational work for Ubuntu and set up the original LinuxConf.au linux conference).

The stories that are spun are always interesting and it's nice that they choose subjects that have done more than the typical code contributions (although they're spoken to their share of hackers as well).

Hopefully FLOSS will continue on better than ever.

Irretrievably geeky?

Okay, so I've fallen a bit behind in the work I need to do in building a basic database for my wife. "No problem", I thought, "I'll just use Access at work and then open it up in OpenOffice Base when I get home, and everything will be just peachy."

While my workstation at work as MS Office, it doesn't have Access. Either they're too tight to spring for the Professional version and settled for the Small Business one, or they just don't want anyone to use it. It's probably the latter as the network is locked down to Confidential security level and I can't even access my Gmail from work. They're a touch paranoid, but they do have their reasons.

My solution was to download a version of OpenOffice from Portable Apps, do a small bit of config tweaking, turn it into a LiveCD and bammo, I'm building databases in my lunch time.

I still haven't worked out if this is pretty cool, or if I just need help.

While on the matter of locked down desktops, at my old work I used to run XMPlay on my workstation so that I could listen to my CDs that I have encoded in ogg vorbis (nicer sound at lower bit rates than MP3s, in my own experience. YMMV.) Since workstations at my new job don't even allow access to the local drive, I've been reluctant to run XMPlay from my roaming network share. I don't particularly want to push my luck. I also don't want to re-encode about 100 of my CDs into MP3 so that I can use Windows Media Player.

My solution? I've downloaded a version of VLC from Portable Apps and I intend to place a copy of that on every DVD containing ogg files so that I never have to think about this problem again. Hopefully it will work (I'm burning my first test DVD this weekend).

Is this pretty cool, or do I just need help?

The coolest thing about all of it of course is that the portable apps I am using (and I include Firefox Portable currently sitting on my USB drive permanently attached to my house keys in this) are free - beer and speech.

Either way, I'm pretty sure using portable apps to kludge around desktop security settings is irretrievably geeky.

Sometimes geek drive alone won't get you through

In the true tech spirit of why do something the easy way when you can geek out while doing it the hard way, I've been fooling around with MySQL.

My wife needs a way to keep track of her students including lesson times, instruments, contact details - enrolment basics really. Knowing I had completed an introduction to databases subject last semester she said "Do you think that maybe you could build a database for me?" I'm not ashamed to admit that if she had also whispered that in my ear, she could quite easily have had her way with me right there and then (unfortunately for me, it is likely while the resulting action would have have been hot and sweaty, that's more in the "Now, can you move the lounge over to that side? Oh, and hold this picture frame up so I can see what it looks like on the wall" rather than the forbidden pleasure type. Still, any attention is good attention, and it's the thought that counts).

After I drew up a basic relational schema, mapped out the tables and assessed just how small the database was likely to be, I looked at it closely. For a fleeting second I thought "this could be just as easily done in a Calc spreadsheet" (and yes, I do have a tendency to think in hyperlinks) but I was able to successfully move on from that moment of weakness to concentrate on the job at hand.

I had installed MySQL recently and tracked down some nice, idiot-friendly GUI tools as well when I remembered that the basic MySQL install is a CLI. I had accepted that my SQL was probably a bit too halting and lacking in confidence to enable me to finish this task quickly through raw SQL alone (the start of the school year is looming after all). I faffed about a bit with downloads and installs, but I was eventually able to get the GUI up and running and input the tables. I was even able to easily work out how to mark primary keys and link up foreign keys as well. This may not sound like much of an achievement, but my only substantial database experience was battling to make an MS Access-centric course compatible with OpenOffice Base so that I wouldn't have to go out and buy a version of MS Office. That did not prepare me very well for using MySQL, although SQLyog did make life much easier.

Entering tables, and setting up relationships is one thing - designing a UI for data entry is another altogether. I spent ages in my last assignment last semester fighting with Base and it's primitive UI functionality (Access is streets ahead of Base in this regard). I didn't relish the thought of trying work out if I could do the same with MySQL. If the general install preferred a CLI for designing the database, the chances were that it may not even have the capability to build GUIs for data entry. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that there was a very good chance that MySQL was designed to be used as a back end and that a front end would need to be designed using something like PHP, Java, Python or Ruby. Urgh. Clock is ticking after all.

Even if I am totally wrong (and please, drop me a line in the comments if I am) and MySQL enables an absolutely stellar user experience to be designed, I just don't have the time to find that out right now. Upshot of all of this? A geek attitude and spending time playing with options is not always enough to bluff your way through. Sometimes you really do need some experience and knowledge.

Over the next few days I'll be remapping the tables in Base and building a basic UI over the top. After all, the whole point of the database, besides getting me needlessly excited, was to allow my wife to keep a better handle on her lesson timetable. It defeats the whole purpose if she needs to come to me every time information needs to be updated.

I haven't entirely given up, though. Once it is up and running in Base, I plan to use some of my precious spare time to work out what I need to do to make a front end to MySQL. I've been gagging for an excuse to teach myself Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and this seems like as good an excuse as any. Now all I need is the spare time...

Amiga still alive and kicking

In news that will warm the hearts of old-school Amiga lovers, I discovered today that the not only is the AmigaOS still being updated but that the final version of AmigaOS 4 has been released.

Now, I was never a Commorodore or Amiga man myself. In the heady days of the C64 I was busy faffing about with an Amstrad CPC 464 (with green monochrome monitor and tape deck! Woot!) and I never did own an Amiga. However, all that I have read since those days indicates that the AmigaOS was one bitchin' operating system which had an untimely and messy demise.

The down side to the AmigaOS release is that it can only be used on the PowerPC based AmigaOne motherboard which, apparently, is on a production hiatus (although more may be released this year).

That makes this a strange class of random news - if you have an AmigaOne system, you probably already know this. If you don't have an AmigaOne system, this news is no good to you anyway (unless it stirs up some loin-lifting nostalgia for your systems of old). However, it does make it perfect news for some random geekery.

Found via Ars Technica [permalink]

Who is watching IPTV anyway?

The latest steaming pile of hype being flung around the internet is the news that the oft-reported new project of the guys who created Skype, the so-called Venice Project, has been rebadged as "Joost" (apparently it doesn't mean much of anything, it's just a word). Joost is still in beta and is currently unavailable to the great unwashed like myself although there are some screenshots floating around the place.

Joost is being hailed as the great white hope in the battle between content delivered online and content delivered through traditional channels such as free-to-air broadcast television and subscription services.

I'm going to admit right now that I know very little about technical aspects of Joost. I have no idea if they intend to be pushing HD content; if the focus will be on streaming, download based or a combination of the two; or even where the content will be coming from. Luckily, this is not a discussion on the hows and whys of Joost, but the whos as in "who is going to be watching anyway?"

One big problem with Joost and the Democracy Player (created and distributed by the Participatory Culture Foundation) is that, in general, watching video on your computer is a pretty sucky way to spend your time. I don't think I'm stretching here to say that most computers are in studies or dens or rumpus rooms and are not set up in a way that is conducive for long-term viewing.

Then there is the question of streaming vs downloading. I'm not a big fan of streaming. It's the same as standard broadcast TV - pausing/ff/rew is difficult (I've watching quite a few streams over the years where pausing makes it start over again). "Real time" video is often constrained by the speed of your connection (my 512k DSL connection makes anything over about 5min long a challenge to watch) as well as network usage. On the other hand, downloading a video file first takes away from the broadcast-ness of the whole idea. It becomes less of a broadcast network and more of a queuing service like Quickflix. In my view this is actually a plus. Apart from sporting events and breaking news, how much of the video that you currently consume needs to be watched "live"? Wouldn't it be better for it to sit in a box somewhere, waiting for you to select when you want to watch it?

This leads me to the issue of the content delivery itself. If watching on the computer isn't comfortable, how are they watching it? While HTPCs (home theatre PCs) are a growing section of the market, until you can buy a media black box at Harvey Norman or JB HIFI or The Good Guys, HTPCs have not caught on. Only the alpha geeks will have built their own little media centre so they can watch video and listen to music through their TV and stereo system in their lounge room, most people won't have this sort of convenient convergence. For example, at the moment when I want to watch a long-form video (like DL.TV), I download the video file (usually in h.264 for high def) and then convert it to DVD to watch on my TV using my DVD player. The conversion process alone can take up to 2 hours (2500+ CPU - no doubt this would be much much much less of an issue if I had a Core2 Duo system *sigh*) so it's hardly convenient. At least I'm comfortable when I do watch it.

Obviously, the best solution would be to have an HTPC hooked up to the TV and a high-speed broadband connection. That way, video could be streamed to the TV or read off the hard drive in a high def format. How many people have a setup like this?

Finally, where is the quality content coming from? "Old tech" TV networks have considerable budgets where they can either buy quality content (depending on individual definitions of quality of course) or commission their own in-house. Where are IPTV providers getting their content from? From what little I have seen of Democracy (I'm still struggling to use it - it steers like a cow on my slow system and my relatively slow connection makes download speeds slow, even with the built-in BitTorrent), the content is almost entirely user-submitted YouTube-style stuff or video podcasts pulled off RSS-feeds from around the globe. While I might find some interesting stuff (eg DL.TV, CommandN, MacBreak etc), I have no idea if there was anything for my wife to watch (and if either of my grandmothers were still alive, I have serious doubts whether there would be anything they would want to watch either). There are sources for independent film and documentaries, but it is still a mammoth task to wade through the crap to find the gems.

One solution may be for the content to be aggregated for you, but then you're just watching a different network which ultimately will have the same issues as entrenched media organisations. Maybe social networks with tagging and recommendations will come to the rescue here.

While IPTV is an interesting and attractive idea, I think it still has some way to go before it will start moving any closer to the mainstream. Unless Joost is an outstanding, out-of-this-world product (which it may well be - I'll definitely check it out when it comes out of beta), I don't think it will be so much revolutionary as evolutionary.

I hope I'm proven wrong on this one. Time will tell.

Painfully upgrading to WindowsXP

While I am an unashamed lover of gadgets and tech more broadly, I’m also a slow mover. With Vista just around the corner (launching 29 January according to the Windows Weekly podcast), I decided now was the time to upgrade – to XP. In the end, the process was a slow one and I have yet to decide if this was due to operator error or a flaw in the upgrade process itself.

I had a fair idea what to expect in the process as just a few weeks ago I upgraded my sister’s install of a shady copy of Win2k (not her fault, the guy who sold her the computer installed it and since my sister is in no way a geek, I don’t expect her to question whether the software on her computer is legit or not when pre-installed) with a fresh full install of XP Home.

I stumped up the cash for the Academic upgrade version XP Professional. I decided to upgrade rather than do a fresh install because, quite frankly, I can’t spare the cash and I chose the Academic version because as a part-time student, I’m entitled to it. Might as well make use of it.

Since I don’t particularly trust any software to perform exactly as it says it will, I did a basic back-up of all the most important files eg various My Docs folders, some downloaded software that I hadn’t copied onto a disc yet and the like. This wasn’t a very difficult task because I had backed up everything when I had my troubles with a dodgy power supply, motherboard and hard drive mid-way through last year. Since that time I had been so busy with uni, work and raising the boy that I hadn’t added a whole lot to the computer. Lucky me. I also decided to clear out all the cruft that had gathered in the user profiles eg browser cache, temp files and so on.

Sufficiently confident that I had copies of everything important, I popped the XP CD in and away I went. It started off smoothly enough. It appeared to detect my current Win2k install with no problems and all my hardware looked like it was present. So far so good. Somewhere along the way though, Windows stated that it required a certain file – viaide.sys – to continue which, for some reason, my addled brain chose to read as “viade.sys”. The dialog box defaulted to a folder deep inside the temp folder of my Administrator account. Stupid me assumed that Windows knew what it was asking for. As I had already cleared out my temp accounts, I couldn’t quickly locate the file. I tried clicking “Cancel”, which seemed to work just fine as the install continued on its merry way. Oh, how I would learn the error of my ways.

The install continued without any further issues and the computer re-booted. Unfortunately, as soon as it hit the “Windows XP” screen, there was a millisecond BSOD and an immediate reboot. Booting in Safe Mode met with a long line of drivers loading before, you guessed it, immediate reboot. I attacked this problem in a way that has always worked for me in the past with Windows: recovery console. No good. 15 minutes of hacking around in the console left me no better off than when I started.

I tried the next best option: re-install. 40 minutes later (with the same request for “viade.sys”) and I was faced with same result. Obviously, this .sys file was important but I had no idea how I was going to retrieve it. I couldn’t do a search for it and maybe download it on to a floppy because I couldn’t even get a computer to boot in safe mode. I was starting to fear that I was screwed until I could get to work and try and find this file the following day.

I toyed with re-installing Win2k but feared that might make things worse. I decided to have Win2k sitting in my other disc drive and when it came to find this “viade.sys” maybe I could track it down on the Win2k disc. I wasn’t looking forward to this as the dialog box would pop up at a stage where there was no power to the USB ports which left me without a functioning mouse. Tabbing through options and hitting Enter didn’t appeal to me.

The file was not on the Win2k disc. I was screwed. Again. To make matters worse, I couldn’t find an option to cancel the install so I had to let it continue through the remaining 35 minutes so I could get back to my no-boot starting point. Urgh.

It was while flicking through my motherboard’s manual that the answer finally hit me – I was more than likely completely misreading the file. I had a VIA-based motherboard which meant that the file was more likely to be viaide.sys (which turned out to be the case) and that the install needed the driver for the IDE controller that the hard drive was plugged in to. I scratched around for a while but I eventually found my motherboard driver disc. Unfortunately, when I re-ran Setup for I think the fourth time, I couldn’t find viaide.sys on the motherboard driver disc. Not at all. I was screwed. Again. x2. Argh.

Final brainwave hit me. If the file was important, Win2k probably used it as well. Therefore it had to be somewhere. The likely location would be in the WINNT folder which has all the system files. I tried trawling through the “drivers” subfolder with the painfully slow and awkward keyboard method but I was not successful. Not at all. Was I screwed for the final time for the night?

Ultimately, I wasn’t. In final desperation, I searched the “system32” folder where, if I had been thinking at all correctly, I should have looked all along. Lo and behold, the little bugger was sitting there, just waiting for me to find it. Needless to say, the install then completed and the computer reboot with no problems while I held my breath and tried not to scream and cry in frustration (I’m picking up bad habits from my 9 month old son it would seem).

The only other complaint I have with the process is that nowhere could I find a way to get my Administrator account to appear on the Welcome screen. I like the look of the Welcome screen and didn’t particularly wish to return to the Win2k-style login box. For no real reason I can recall I tried hitting Ctrl+Alt+Delete twice at the Welcome screen and I was able to access the login box as well. In the end, a quick perusal of the excellent Windows Supersite means that once I download the TweakUI Power Toy, I should be able to add this to the Welcome screen just fine.

Now I’m going through the painstaking process of tweaking the system so it’s just how I want it, installing all the system updates and so on but that’s pointless busy work I don’t mind doing.

Having used XP for the last few years at work, I’m already comfortable with it, but it still seems like a much nicer experience than Win2k (which I loved dearly and will always remember fondly). I can’t put my finger on what it is but it does make me wonder why I waited so long before upgrading.

You know tech geekiness is contagious when...

A couple of weeks ago I was transcoding some epidsodes of DL.TV from H.264 to DVD so I could watch them from the comfort of my beanbag in the lounge room on our 51cm TV, rather than unergonomically cramped up near my 19" CRT monitor in front my computer in our cluttered study.

My wife, who while being a music geek and musical theatre geek is in no way technically minded, was vaguely watching the transcoding (done via Nero Vision - I'll admit there are geekier ways of doing it, but none quite so easy with good quality picture on my TV) while talking to me about something. All of a sudden, in the middle of the completely unrelated conversation, she pipes up with "Hey, that's Jim Louderback with Robert Heron. Where's Patrick Norton?"

I've created a monster.

I also think she's got a crush on Robert.