Saturday 30 May 2009

The Wave is coming ...

Google Wave that is ;-)

http://wave.google.com/

Here's a direct link to the Tech Preview video :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
(Skip forward to 7:30 if you prefer to leave out some of the marketing and introduction at the start)

The video is an hour and 20 minute demo on a product that Google has been working on for the last 2 years or so. It is a view on how the way we communicate using computers is likely to change in the very near future.

Seeing this, I am really beginning to believe some of the hype about Google becoming a true Microsoft killer. This doesn't even take into account all the hard work Google is doing to supplant Microsoft's products through software vendors with their own paid for products (an issue for another blog post). With technology like Wave, Google totally outclasses pretty much anything anyone else is doing right now.

Interestingly, Google is putting the protocol behind Wave forward as an open standard so other software vendors can build their own interoperable (and possibly competing) systems and products with it :-

http://www.waveprotocol.org/

This is all very altruistic but it does beg the question, "how do they make any money out of this"? I guess we'll be finding out in the months ahead.

Maybe it's just paranoid old me but aspects of Wave are also a little scary. It opens up a whole Pandora's box of new possible security and privacy issues (much as any new technology does). Some of those bots look real friendly in a demo setting (Spelly, Buggy, Tweety etc) but ones could also be built for less savoury purposes in the wrong hands.

On the whole though this is really cool technology and opens up some very interesting possibilities for new and better ways of working (in real time) collaboratively in the future.

Nice work Lars and team!

Sunday 24 May 2009

Wingsuit Base Jumping - the new extreme sport

This has to be one of the most extreme sports of all time. It takes base jumping to a whole new level by combining this already dangerous pastime with the latest advances in wingsuit technology developed over the last 10 years.

The most dangerous part has to be the practice known as "proximity flying" where the wingsuit base jumper glides over the mountain side on the way down only a few metres above the ground!

You really have to see it to know what I'm talking about :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiXNxlM4BeE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ycBGkLkEkg

It literally makes your hairs stand up watching it!

See Also

Loic Jean Albert's Homepage - great details on the history of this sport, starting with Icarus :-) and the evolution of wingsuit technology.

Saturday 16 May 2009

Yahoo Pipes - a web service for the customisation of RSS and Atom feeds

In the last couple of years I've started subscribing to more and more RSS and Atom feeds preferring interesting articles and information to come to me rather than having to go out trawling a list of well known websites on a fairly ad hoc basis for new articles of interest.

Google Reader is my feed reader of choice mainly because it's online and I can access it from anywhere without having to maintain multiple installs of feed reader software and settings.

I'm fairly ruthless with my feed subscriptions preferring feeds that are reasonably low volume (1 of 2 posts a week) with high quality content. There is usually a single human being on the other end with a limited amount of bandwidth.

Quite a few feeds are aggregates of multiple contributions (e.g. news websites) or are automated to provide information when changes to some underlying system occur (e.g. check ins for a code hosting site). They contain useful information but you sometimes quickly get bogged down by the sheer volume and frequency of updates coming through. I don't stay subscribed to these feeds for long when all I'm doing is clicking on "Mark All As Read" as hundreds of unread entries pile up.

There are certain feeds in this latter category that I would still like to follow, if only I could reduce the noise by either adding an include or exclude filter and possibly generating sub feeds that I could publish and make available to myself and others.

This was a pipe dream until this morning when I came across Yahoo Pipes :-)

You rarely come across technology that does exactly what you want out of the box without requiring a decent amount of customisation first, either through configuration or some coding. Yahoo Pipes allowed me solve a problem that has been nagging me for ages and it was dead simple to do.

As its name suggests Yahoo Pipes makes use concepts familiar to those who know and love UNIX command line with I/O processing pipelines, redirection and a set of options similar to tools like grep, sed and awk. These are all provided through a great visual designer and editor that make settings up and publishing your own custom feeds really easy and most importantly very quick to crank out. You can literally build and publish a custom feed in 5 minutes or less without much prior experience of Yahoo Pipes. That is real power (hats off to the designers - this kind of thing is not easy to do).

Here is a sample feed that is already saving me loads of time filtering out stuff I'm not interested in :-

Source feed :-

PyPI Package Update RSS feed

http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=rss

Resulting feed :-

PyPI Package Update RSS feed (without Zope or Plone packages)

http://pipes.yahoo.com/drkjam/pypi_updates_no_zope_or_plone

You can organise your new feeds by giving them sensible and meaningful URLs too (another great feature).

So, if you subscribe to a lot of feeds and find that you want to tame them this is definitely the way forward™.

Check out these impressive tech demo videos for some real "wow" moments :-