Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

It took some dragging myself out of bed to get to BarCamp Leeds 2008 but it was definitely more than worth it because the free beer actually arrived this time. It got off to a brave start with Dom defending the very name of SEO.

There seemed to be a definite musical theme to BarCamp with great demo of the music sequencing software that doesn’t fry your head like Cubase and the rest called Ableton Live. Ableton is kinda loops-oriented but as the name suggests, is geared towards live performances.

Ian Forrester demoed the Pacemaker (YouTube), which he described as an iPod killer in that it’s a portable music player but one with which you can mix and DJ your tracks. You have to go and see/hear it.

After blogging about being so disappointed at the media consumption emphasis of the iPhone, something that gives you something to do, something to be creative with, an experience to get lost in… seeing devices like the Pacemaker is really encouraging. I’m not a big fan of dance music, I’ve never quite got DJ-ing, but Ian got me hooked just because of the creative aspect to what he was doing. Great stuff.

The ukulele made an appearance in the bafflingly excellent Ukepedia project. The premise is simple… Wikipedia articles sung to ukulele. Pure genius that raises all sorts of complications about licenscing (another common theme to BarCamp).

Dave Verwer gave an excellent peep into how to create an iPhone app, creating a HashTagWatcher app in seconds, which became instant audience participation as those present started “joining in”… you had to be there. It was fab.

As ever, it was a totally inspirational event on so many levels, my only disappointment being the sessions I missed due to not being able to be in four places at one time. Maybe Imran will pull his finger out and get a cloning booth sorted by the time BarCampLeed09 rolls round.

Yesterday was a funny day, so funny (as in not even slightly) I need to get it off my chest.

I have a geek problem. I am writing crawlers that go off and collect information about web sites that are some how linked. A simple example is that having identified a few hundred competitors I then set out to try and gather information about them. I call this collection a cloud, not because its big but because its fluffy and random and difficult to manipulate, like clouds.

My problem is this. Once I’ve gathered a lot of data, I then find some new data that I want to add in. Adding in new data is easy if you don’t want to mess with your existing data but a spectacular pain if you have to start changing your database (and it contains 2 or 3 GB of stuff).

For a while I was happy with a tool called Django Evolution that lets you change your data model without exporting all you data and bringing it back in again… but it breaks. And Django Evolution really doesn’t like it if you want to change a field from TextField( “23.45″) into FloatField( 23.45 ). And it really doesn’t like it if you want to make big changes, evolution, in this case only works in very, very, small steps.

My other problem is this. At times I want to add in an arbitrary lump of data, for example a spreadsheet. I don’t want to have to manually create a table for it (with over a hundred columns) either, I just want to add it and see if it adds any value to my cloud. You’d think there’d be a (python) tool for importing a spreadsheet into MySQL wouldn’t you? The MySQL LOAD FILE needs you to define all the columns first. At this point I can vaguely remember than on Windows you could set things up so any file/database whatever was a data source, which right now sounds like a good idea.

Then I found Picalo a tool for Data Analysis and Fraud Detection. Yes, Fraud Detection! It hasn’t spotted me yet though. It’s a lovely tool (written in Python) that “in theory” lets you wire together MySQL databases and spreadsheets. Then you can create tables based on queries or python code so complex I really don’t understand it at all. It’s like proper maths and statistics… as in scary. The only problem with it, is that it doesn’t want to play with my databases… So tantalisingly close to a solution but not quite.

Picalo may still have legs though, I’ve not written it off just yet. It reminds me of a tool I used to use (I forget it’s name) for statistical analysis of web site log files. A practice which back then taught me, because the tool crashed so often, that I’d simply “gathered too much data” to be able to do anything useful with it. Mm?! Maybe I should pay attention to that memory.

My real problem is this. Relational databases are a pain. They aren’t really suited to what I’m trying to achieve. At best they’re slow to work with. At worst, I spend more time making the database work than making the data work…. if you know what I mean.

In desperation I tried adding the ZODB (Zope’s object database) to Django. Working with the ZODB brought back fond memories of when Zope was simple enough for me to use. I love the idea that you just make a python class persistent and it “just gets stored”. I’m very tempted. Thinking about it I should maybe use MySQL for the main part of my data and add an object layer of meaning on top of it… which is sort of what I did with Spinalot back in the day. Surely there has to be a better way. One of the things I “like” about MySQL is that when used with Django it’s very easy to create interfaces to explore my data, interfaces that can be adapted and tweaked on-the-fly.

I guess than Doug and Andy would tell me to have a go with DBXML like they have… but here my problems are these…. firstly, it looks difficult and secondly, until I get all my data in I don’t know if I’ll be able to get it in or get it out again.

There. A load of problems with no real answers… just what you wanted eh? Whinge over… for now.

I guess my ultimate problem, and maybe the answer to all my problems is this… I need geeky collaborators who are much better at all this than me. So if all of the above sounds understandable and easily fixable, do get in touch.

Andy recently called me a Mactard…and sowed seeds of doubt about Apple’s place in the universe.

• I recently lost a lot of my personal data upgrading my laptop to 10.5. The installer crashed. Yes I’d backed up and I no I won’t bore you with the details of how and why Apple’s idea of backing up doesn’t work (and never has).
• I lost a lot of someone else’s work upgrading to 10.5 having made a full backup but then had to downgrade back to 10.4 (10.5 doesn’t work on old powerbooks) and then couldn’t access the backup files (oh goody)… The only reason I upgraded this machine was to get automatic-over-wifi-backups in the first place, oh irony of ironies. How we laughed…
• Now my iphone apps all crash, all the time. I have a phone with dubious reception that would double up as a spirit level but doesn’t. See: iPhone 3G apps crash on startup and … having got all excited about the iPhone, then having become jaded by its underwhelminess, to be made to “just get it to work” is a total joy. And even better… the reason why it’s crashing is probably to do with poorly implemented DRM… something I didn’t want or need implemented so bad that it stops me from using the entire device… Yippee!
  
• The difference between iTunes (on my iPhone) which is actually the Apple Music Store and iTunes (on my Mac)… which is actually iSync with iTunes added and with the Apple Music Store… screams to me that Apple need to sit down and all agree what exactly is called what. I mean I have an icon on my iPhone called iPod!
• OK, so now, what is the difference between your Apple ID, your Mobile me login and your iTunes Music Store/AppStore login? The answer is, “Who knows?” because I have to login into the same account with different details depending on whether I’m on my mac or on my iphone… one uses the username and the other the full email address of my mobile me account.
• And where will your MobileMe data go/be/be resolved? The big question here is not whether it works or not but are the users expectations set and met? Does the user get a clear picture of what should happen, and what will happen (when)?
• And now AppStore is moaning about authentication….

You spend long enough riding by the seat of your pants and putting things back together and you start to wonder why you’re even bothering. I guess I should have read Apple’s small print which says something along the lines of “Hey it’s shiny, so shut up and buy something else”.

When Apple sold me the idea of the computer for the rest of us, I didn’t realize that the rest of us were all IT technicians fixing broken computers.

The worst part of all of this is feeling like a moaning minnie. I’m pretty geeky, I can use computers and I haven’t a clue what is going on with Apple or worse, if I did have a clue, if I’d agree with it.

I imagine being able to run a search and get the results back on a beautiful timeline. Well now you can… here’s one that someone made earlier….

A Timeline of Zombie Movies

… This tool doesn’t quite work, for example, is a video uploaded to YouTube in 2008 about the Leeds United winning the FA Cup a current item or a dim and distant dream from the 70’s?  The results get very close to being something spectacular, and I could see how, with a bit of careful pruning you could author a great resource that was a mix of found material and user-time-synch’ed stuff.

I think this app makes use of the Freebase data cloud.

Take a look at the difference between a Wikipedia timeline on the Iraq War and a user-created version of the Iraq War and YouTube’s Iraq War…. Mmm… I’ve just tried to pull some of these sources/interpretations together into one IRAQ War timeline here, I’m not sure if it’s working properly, but being able to additionally see a timeline of events on a map is pretty close to stunning (even if it doesn’t quite work).

Recently, a GeekUp message rekindled my long-standing appreciation of all things zoomable. One of the problems with many zooming demos is just that, they’re only demos.

Like many visualisation examples, zooming works best when you it’s a tool rather than a media-type. You need to get your hands dirty, to fly around and play with your data rather than consuming someone else’s zooming media.

In the same way that reading a great book inspires you to write or seeing a fab painting makes you want to sketch or hearing a moving song starts you singing… In same way that writing bad poetry makes you appreciate the good stuff or painting an awful picture makes you visit galleries…

ZuiPrezi is wonderful! And not only is it interesting from a media consumption point of view, it’s a tool with which you can create your very own zoomable presentation or environment. I’m absolutely blown away by the potential of this….

For those without embedding, go here.

Why does Google Translate ask you what language you’d like to translate a web page from? I haven’t a clue what language a foreign page is… which is kind of the point… but the page itself will be in a language, won’t it?

All Google should want to know is what language I want something to be translated to (say, the language I do most of my search queries in would be a good starting point).

Anyone know what language this page is?

Translated version of http://www.halacsy.com/blog/

Dear Google,

you can improve the quality of the web for all of us by killing spam blogs. It’s quite easy to do, just search for … “wrote an interesting post today on” and “Here’s a quick excerpt“.

Here’s almost a million pages you can take out of your database right now..  using Google,

thank you,

tom

p.s On of the things that really astonishes me about dullards who make spam blogs, is how little imagination they show. If I was creating spam blogs I’d at least mix up the words a bit to “let’s rip with a great post“… or “has written an iteresting article over here” or whatever. I’d at least use different a Wordpress theme to Kubrick.

I imagine that with even the smallest amount of thinking that went “what are the characteristics of an unoriginal spam blog” would remove at least 10% of the web in a single stroke… (And 10% of Google’s income from Adsense but they don’t need the money do they?).

Because I’ve tagged my post with the iPhone tag, ironically, this post will automatically appear on blog spam sites like BestiPhone2U.info (an iPhone blog spam site)… which uses the Kubrick Wordpress theme. You know, killing ALL sites that use the default options for Wordpress wouldn’t be a bad idea… if you use Kubrick, you’re dead in the water imaginitively anyway.

Setting the creative bar a little higher would also force spam-bloggers to be more imaginitive, which in itself is a good thing, they need the mental exercise. Whilst being spammy yet creative they might also realise the errors of their ways and do something genuinely creative instead, like solving textual input problems on the iPhone, for example.

You never know.

One of my clients humorously lamented the fact that using T9 on a mobile phone for texting was becoming a lost art since they’d got an iPhone and started using the little on-screen keyboard.

I am slightly amazed by the lack of outrageous ideas in the iPhone, especially in the area of typing text. I would have expected Apple to at least re-invent text itself, just so the demos were really, really, really cool… “We call it iNglish!” .

If anyone remembers the Palm Pilot there is, somewhere out there a version of iPhone Graffiti, which I remember with a certain fondness although I’m not sure I’d like to meet up again any time soon. What interests me about text input, is that people, in the past, have tended to use their phones for T9 text entry and yet the iPhone seems to lends itself to two-fingered and two-handed typing, which also sort of means you need to put the thing down in order to type. I’ve tried using my thumb to type and I just can’t see the keys, I need a transparent thumb.

I started thinking about all the other ways you could, if you wanted, enter text onto a device that accepts, tapping, gestures, multi-touch, shakes, rattles and rolls. For example, would it be possible to build a Chord keyboard, something I’ve always liked the sound of, or maybe one that takes the “fits like a glove” approach? What I’d like about this is that at least I could type whilst walking or standing at the bus queue.

The thing that really interested me, was, if a system of text entry could let me type on my iPhone at the speed of thought, it wouldn’t matter how crazy it was, people would learn it. Not everyone would learn this new system, but perhaps writers and reporters would. It would be a text-logging tool, in that you wouldn’t want to edit or craft anything using this method, but it would be great for idea-capturing, or transcribing, or stream-of-consciousness type writing. Despite the clunkiness, I quite like the GKOS demo movie, which seems to be a keyboard with only 2 keys and works a bit like a motor-bike gear-shift… up down, down, down up.

I’m surprised that there isn’t a separate keypad to go with the iPhone, like the Frogpad, but having an additional keypad kind of defeats where I was heading with this because… what would an input method that made the most out of the iPhone’s features be? This is a bit like making a purse from a pig’s ear except that I’m sure that at some point somebody told the inventor of T9 that it’d never work. The Easy Egg Alphabet looks crazy enough a writing system for anyone.

And then I started look at shorthand and discovered there are loads of different shorthand systems, surely one of these would work, especially if you can imagine the iPhone screen area to be slowly scrolling by as you write, or zooming into the distance perhaps. Or how about a tool like Dasher for the iPhone? Although the Mac Beta crashes when I get to the second letter of a word I want to type/dash, I still have a soft spot for the lunacy/genius of this approach to text entry.

And then I had a eureka moment.… To create a fast textual input system, that took advantage of all the iPhone features, why not use Braille? So I started thinking about how you would enter dots on an iPhone (I think it can only take two fingers at a time but would handle strokes very well… ahem).

I then thought, if you added type-ahead scrolling (perhaps like Dasher), and showed people the letters (something that you can only do with a big screen area) then maybe you would have a flicky-tappy-strokey™ input system that is kind of designed around what you can do with two fingers rather than, like a regular keyboard, do with two hands. So,

I started having a go at making a simple iPhone application to play with some of these ideas. I didn’t get much further than what you see to the right.

I then realised that not all eureka moments are what you’d call “any good”… Ah well.

I still think that we’ll see some beautiful and maybe crazy textual input tools quite soon that do take advantage of what the iPhone or iPhone3.0 has to offer. In the same way as Tetris stormed computer games, but actually was very, very simple… and the same way that the Rubik’s cube was was a few squares of plastic and a heap of genius… I think someone somewhere will have a eureka moment about the way we write text.

Until then, I eagerly await a copy of MessagEase on the iPhone which looks a lot of fun.

When you see how a page gets created,  you’ll see, and this is before they test it on a heap of different browsers… PDFs are easy.

There’s a new search engine on the block called Cuil. What’s a search engine you ask? Well, it’s what we used to use before Google was invented… and they didn’t work.

Cuil is, as it happens, quite nice, returning good results, with an interesting layout, clean interface, search categories, having type-ahead scrolling and it’s even snappy to use. Even better…. it’s black rather than white, which in emotional language means it is indeed cool.

Whether we need another search engine is neither here nor there, because even when I’ve genuinely liked an alternative to Google, Google is so in-grained that I end up using it anyway despite myself. Google is a hard habit to break.

But, and this is the big but, it has one hugely important missing feature. A feature that you don’t truly appreciate till it’s gone. Cuil has no “Did you mean?” search correction. If I was designing a search engine, this would be the very first feature. You can argue all day about features or whether search results are relevant or not and not get anywhere useful but the one thing you know totally and absolutely about any search engine is that people will make typos. It’s completely and totally guaranteed.

I wish them luck and wonder when they’ll be releasing CuilReader, CuilBlogger, CuilAnalytics, CuilBase, CuilAdwords etc. etc. etc.

On the GeekUp discussion list I was surprised that Alex admitted that he was disappointed by the Delicious re-design, that he’d become emotionally engaged with Delicious’ clunky visual appearance.

What I found surprising is not the admission itself but the fact he felt that he had to admit it in the first place.  Of course we all have emotional responses to software that are based on visual appearance, experience, style preferrences and various other voodoo  means of deciding that something is good or not.

For example, I have totally emotional responses to any software that begins with the word “Omni” because, being a fan of OmniGraffle, any other tool that comes from the same family must be OK, mustn’t it?

I have a blanket dislike for most Flash/AIR apps because of the styling of the widgets (like buttons and scrollbars etc) that is not based on anything rational at all… I don’t think. I just get the feeling that although it looks like an interface, walks like an interface… it won’t quack like an interface when I need it to.

I have an emotional gut reaction to Drupal and Plone-based sites, because in general, they look like Drupal or Plone sites… and in the same way that seeing a boom mike appear in the top of a movie scene, it sort of beaks the suspension of disbelief, or in the case of software and web sites, seeing a Plone-esque icon sort of lets me know what I am going to get, that there will be no delightful surprises along the way.

Which brings me onto this… Wikidbase… which, logically has so many ticks for a wiki-fan, python-using, funky-data-model-ista like me. But take a look at it. My emotion response to the interface is so strong that despite it sounding like a worthy and interesting project, I can’t get past the huge header and the ugly colours and that TREE!. It looks like a great application but my personal visual preference is stopping me from downloading it.

I probably could quickly hack the CSS file myself, but the default styling is telling me that there’s something wrong here and that I should back away quietly…

What’s your emotional response to Wikidbase?…

Screenshots | Nick Blundell - Projects

You know me, I love a good zooming interface, but as they say, a good zooming interface is hard to find. And no, the iPhone doesn’t have a zooming interface, just because it’s zoom-y… two very different things.

The discussion on Interesting? zoom gui on GeekUp | Google Groups gave me reason to dig out and re-visit lots of zooming implementations which was like zooming backwards down memory lane a very enjoyable way to spend half an hour.

Someone pointed to ZuiPrezi, a zoomable interface for creating presentations which is absolutely delightful, if you like being delighted absolutely that is. Give yourself a few minutes to play and enjoy (you have to sign-up)… because your worth it.