Category Archives: Uncategorized

Microsoft Surface

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Rob mentioned Microsoft Surface to me at lunch time, I had seen it on several blogs but   haven’t really had a chance to have a look at it. It’s very impressive technonology. as Rob points out its a combination of many different muli touch techniques that we’ve seen in other demonstrations over the last six or so months. As far as I’m aware this is the first commercial product to enter the market, and they’ve done a great marketing piece on it over at http://www.microsoft.com/surface

However if you want to see it an action, I found this product demo on YouTube. I was very impressed with how the surface interacts with real world objects like camera’s, for example, placing a digital camera on the table will automatically grab the photos off it.

Below is another demonstration of Surface, this time over at PopularMechanics

There more I see this in action the more I want one!

Google Launches "Streetside View" and "Mapplets"

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Google have revamped their 2D Maps with a new a feature they are calling Street View. When viewing maps of certain cities around the world you’ll get a street side view of the area your currently in, and it isn’t static! You can interact with the image to move along the street it even allows you to change your angle and move in a new direction.  Google have developed this new technology with Immersive Media, and all I can say is, it’s very very impressive.

If you want to try it out here’s a map of San Francisco that has side views, and here’s a map of Las Vegas , I really recommend trying it!

Google have also launched their new Mapplets service. Mapplets are a special kind of XML/Javascript based Google Gadget that you can add directly to Google Maps. Here’s a link to a special preview page where you can try out a handful of Mapplets. The official blurb from Google on this new feature is copied below:

Mapplets enables third party developers to create mini applications that can be displayed on Google Maps, much like Google Gadgets are displayed on iGoogle. These Mapplets contain a variety of information, from housing listings to crime data, and tools like distance measurement. Users can select from a wide range of Google and third party Mapplets to display on the Map, essentially creating their own “mashup of mashups” directly on the Google Maps site, while still enjoying the built-in functionality of Google Maps, such as local search and driving directions. A number of our partners, including WeatherBug, Booking.com and Platial have already created Mapplets.

UFC 71 – ‘Rampage’ knocks out the Iceman

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Managed to watch UFC 71 late last night and was hugely impressed with Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson. I predicted a few months back that in my opinion he would defeat the reigning champion Chuck Liddell when the two of them finally fought for the title.  Last night rampage proved me right with a devastating first round knockout of Liddell.

You can see highlights from the fight here.

Book: The Battle for God

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The Battle for God, by Karen Amstrong

A friend of mine lent me this book recently, after I lent him Sam Harris The End of Faith, which I’ve talked about before on this blog. Both books deal with analysing the phenomenon of fundamentalism but the two authors deal with the subject in very different ways. Harris’ book is full of vitriol and lacks any real compassion, whilst some of his arguments are interesting this gets lost in his rabidly anti religious stance, his intolerance of faith is as damaging as the very fundamentalism he discusses. Armstrong on the other hand tries to rationalise and understand monotheistic fundamentalism,by examining in detail Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalism. She examines each of them in turn with dignity and depth and amazing richness of detail particularly from a historical point of view

Unlike Harris'(who is so rabidly anti-islam that he’s become the poster child for Islamophobes ), Armstrong’s analysis is very objective, surprisingly so in fact, and I’m very glad I read the book, it taught me a great deal. She tries to understand why fundamentalists believe as they do and behave as they do, but she certainly isn’t afraid of articulating her own feelings about these people.

One of the most interesting arguments (if that’s the right word) she makes is that as scientific rationalism began to “explain away” God, fundamentalism rose up as its “implacable” enemy. It’s fascinating how she explains that before this conflict between scientific theories and literal readings of holy texts everyone embraced the “Independence relationship” between science and religion – a theory ascribed to Ian Barbour. In which he describes science and religion as separate domains of equal value in life since they focus on dealing with separate parts of our existence.

Armstrong tries to de-demonise fundamentalism and I think offers some hope in favouring discussion, dialogue and integration as a way out of the ever increasing conflict between fundamentalists and humanists.

It’s a very well written book and offers a valuable insight into the genesis of the fundamentalist movement and what keeps these movements growing. It’s an insightful read and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interesting the debate around fundamentalism.

Starcraft II … finally!

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I loved the original Starcraft games released by Blizzard. I was very pleased to read that they have finally announced the long-awaited sequel. In addition to that they have released a set of trailers which you can view here, that show case the game features and the new units, races etc. The best way to describe Starcraft is, Warcraft in space! and from the trailers you can see that the graphics are absolutely amazing! Whislt retaining its RTS roots.

I can’t wait to get my hands on this game…

Terrorism in SecondLife … and some other thoughts

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Came across this article … looks like vandals in Second Life blew up ABC Island. Unlike in the real world, in the virtual world of Second Life, creators Linden Labs, were able to “rollback” the island and restore most of what was destroyed. They aren’t the only commercial organisation that has been targetted in this way.

Whilst these incidents are both amusing and also a tad disturbing what I found was more interesting was this bit of research done by Tateru Nino that provides some numbers for how many SL users actually visit corporate sites created in SL. Perhaps it’s like I said before … people don’t want to visit Dell or Coco Cola in a virtual fantasy world.

Contrary to some people’s opinions I dont hate Second Life … there are some things its very good at …

Whilst I was at Xtech I listened to a very interesting talk by Matt Biddulph who demonstrated, something I’ve mentioned before, which is just how useful Second Life can be as a modelling tool particularly as Matt demonstrated, when you are able to link physical objects in the real world with objects in the virtual world.

Semantic web starting points

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I’ve been getting to grips with SPARQL over the last week, probably more so than I have at any time over the last year. SPARQL is an RDF query language and one of the nice things about the Talis Platform is that you dont have to know SPARQL in order to retrieve data. So up until recently I really didnt have much need to write SPARQL queries, I could pretty much do what I wanted with the platform using its other RESTful services.

The platform however has extensive support for SPARQL, so whilst working on a spike this week it was apparant that some of the things I wanted to do would require writing some queries. I used it as an opportunity to brush up on my RDF and SPARQL – it’s amazing how easily we can take things for granted when the tools and services we use on a day to day basis hide us from low level implementation details.

If your anything like me when you want to brush up on something you you tend to scour bookshelves, or google for bits of information, which can be time consuming and sometimes a bit hit and miss. Fortunately Danny came to my rescue, he joined Talis recently and I think he’s a fantastic addition to the team. Danny sent me a link to his Semantic Web Starting Points, a collection of links he’s compiled that provide a great introduction to semantic web technologies, which obviously includes RDF and SPARQL.

Thanks Danny!

Spikes, PHP and a Platform that just works

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I’ve had a pretty good week. I’ve been totally engrossed in a project I’ve been working on since getting back from Xtech last week. Essentially I’ve been working on a spike with Andrew and Hardeep to extend the functionality in our Project Cenote concept car.

The purpose of the spike was two fold. Firstly to try to better understand how to build a funky new set of features into Cenote, and secondly to allow the members of the team become familiar with and experiment with some technologies that they aren’t familiar with.

In fact it felt quite good leaving work today, having gotten to the point where the little prototype is pretty much feature complete. What’s really impressed me isn’t necessarily what it does (which is cool!), but the speed with which we’ve been able to put it all together. The spike was timeboxed to two weeks, but the reality is that the bulk of the implementation has actually been completed within the last few days. It’s by no means a production system it’s just enough to hopefully facilitate some of the discussions we hope to have both internally and externally … much like the first release of Cenote, which we Open Sourced recently.

The original version of Cenote was a read only application that allowed users to search for books and then mashed up the results with data held in various stores in the Talis Platform as well as external sources such as Amazon in order to provide users with some pretty useful information. This spike extends the original version by allowing users to use that data to create and share some really useful things.

I think there’s some important reasons why we have been able to put this together so quickly. The technology stack has been kept very simple – its just an application built in PHP5, running under Apache 2. Furthermore the application is built upon our Talis Platform which is constantly evolving and becoming more and more powerful. I’m not saying that just as someone who has worked on building that platform, I’m actually saying that as someone who has been using and consuming it’s services primarily to build applications with it.

When Rob and I originally wrote Cenote, we were both impressed at how easily we were able to use the platform, as it was then, to put together a cool looking application in the space of a couple of days. If that impressed me at the time, then I’m doubly impressed at how simple it’s been to create an application that supports creation, deletion and updating of data.