Category Archives: Technology

Google Tech Talk: Mashups – Combining Web Applications to Make Desktop Productivity Tools

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An interesting tech talk by Mark Birbeck CEO of X-Port. Some of my colleagues saw Mark talk at the mashup* event in London last month. Although I have reservations about the Sidewinder framework he proposes, we at Talis are doing more and more work to make API’s available to developers that can be called from desktop based applications like the widgets and gadgets Mark describes. The problem with Sidewinder though is it provides a wrapper around web based applications allowing you to run them on your desktop – and im struggling to see the value in that.

I’ve done a fair bit of work creating Yahoo (Konfabulator) Desktop Widgets that use our API’s which will be released in the new few months, as exemplars of how developers out there can mashup our API’s with other services to create interesting and even compelling new applications. We like mashups at Talis, in fact we held a very successful mashup competition last year, which we are running again this year so if your interested why not enter the competition.

Project Cenote

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One of the projects on I worked on at Talis before christmas was our Project Cenote exemplar.


click to visit

Put simply Cenote allows you to search our platform for information on books and stuff. It’s a bit of a mashup since it seamlessly integrates our data and content with data and content from Amazon, and some other partners.

Cenote was created to serve as an example of how simple it is to create applications using the new Talis Platform. Rob and I worked on it for a few days, although we spent a lot of that time developing the rather unique look it has. The last thing we wanted it to look like was a traditional, stoic, boring OPAC. Amazing what you can do with a little CSS and some imagination, huh?

Looks aside what was really cool about Cenote was that Rob and I were able to build the application in very little time, we paired up on it, which meant we sat at one desk and pretty much coded it from scratch together over a couple of days or so. It’s actually a pretty thin skin built upon the platform.

Cenote is basically a small PHP5 application sitting inside Apache 2. The application makes web service calls to the Platform which returns data in RSS format. The application then uses a couple of XSLT stylesheets to transform the data into the UI you see.

You can find out more about Cenote over at the Talis Developer Network, we’ve decided to Open Source so it so that developers can see how simple it is build upon our platform services. It serves as one of several examples already published, and many more on the way. I’ve written an article on the TDN that explains briefly how to install the sources and get it running locally. So have a play 🙂

Google Apps Launches premium offerings

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Everyone knew it would happen sooner or later but it’s official. Google is launching a premium service for companies wishing to use Google’s on-line app’s as opposed to traditional desktop suites such as MS Office. The premium package includes a custom 10GB Gmail inbox, Google Calendar, Writely, Google Spreadsheet, GTalk IM, Google Pages, Google Custom Home page, and iGoogle – the price will be around $50 per Employee per year, as opposed to MS Office which costs between $500-$600 per license..

You can read more about the competitive pricing in this articly over on NY Times. It’s going to be interesting to see how Microsoft react, however I doubt they’re will be any immediate impact from this, it will take time for Google to take any significant market share for the simple reason that I personally don’t believe large organisations are ready to trust Google with all their corporate data … yet!
I’ve been using OpenOffice for a while now, I also have MS Office on my works laptop. My own feeling is that as much people berate Microsoft, the Office suite is actually really quite good. Open Office is catching up, but does have a fair way to go in terms of a feature by feature comparison. Google’s Writely ( word processor ) doesn’t come close to having the same number of features in it as either of the other two, but the question is … does it need to? I don’t think it does. Most users probably dont use more than 30% of the features ( if that ) in MS Word – I know I don’t! ( admittedly I’d still love to use LaTex ).

Google’s new offering is not only a threat to both OpenOffice and MS Office, it’s an excellent example of how, with today’s technologies, you can liberate people from the desktop and deliver compelling Software as a Service Solutions, that users can use … anywhere! They’re not tied down to a single machine … and that’s really cool!

In fact find out more over at the Official Google blog.

7 habits for effective text editing

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Here’s a really cool talk by Bram Moolenaar the creator of Vim. There’ some really great tips some of which are obvious others aren’t. I remember when Rob and I were paired on Cenote, we did most of our development work on Fedora Core, Rob re-introduced my to Vi and Vim and gave me loads of great tips, this talk was somewhat reminiscent of that. It’s definitly worth watching!

P2P has no effect on legal music sales

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Rob recently talked about Steve Jobs views on how the music industry’s insistence on DRM simply doesnt work, which I agree with. Along similar lines I was very interested to read about a new study published in the Journal of Political Economy. I think the study refers to this paper, or perhaps a more recent version of it entitled The effect of file sharing on Record Sales, an Empirical analysis. that asserts that illegal music downloads have no noticeable effect on the sale of music – which is completely contrary to the claims made by the record industry.

The brain scan that read people’s intentions

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Came across this article on the Guardian online.

A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act

When I read the headline the first thought that sprung to mind was 1984 closely followed by Minority Report. It reveals how far neuroscience is progressing but an urgent debate is needed on the ethical issues surrounding such technologies.

The idea of being able to control a computer with your mind, or a wheelchair on the face of it sounds quite appealing and advocates of this technology argue that it could have many such benefits.

Detractors maintain that such technology could be used to create an Orwellian style society. This kind of technology has the potential to change society, and we need to understand and encourage debate around its ethical use:

“Do we want to become a ‘Minority Report’ society where we’re preventing crimes that might not happen? For some of these techniques, it’s just a matter of time. It is just another new technology that society has to come to terms with and use for the good, but we should discuss and debate it now because what we don’t want is for it to leak into use in court willy nilly without people having thought about the consequences” Barbara Sahakian,Professor Neuro-Psychology at Cambridge

“These techniques are emerging and we need an ethical debate about the implications, so that one day we’re not surprised and overwhelmed and caught on the wrong foot by what they can do. These things are going to come to us in the next few years and we should really be prepared,” Professor John Dylan-Haynes