how to amuse yourself with panoramic mode on the k750i when waiting for the tram after a curry in Goteborg.

it wouldn't be a proper geek conference without the site of loads of people sitting in the corridor using powerbooks! a common site at europython 2005...

i've been tinkering wiv me new K750i gadget and I have some findings to report:-

The camera is great, not great as in fantastic picture quality, but great as in really useable, even for 4 x 6 prints I should think. I've uploaded an uncompressed example here, taken outdoors which is where it works best. I've also uploaded another example here, taken indoors in low light using the built in light - note - not a flash as such, rather a continuous beam from a couple of LEDS - you can see some graininess in this which highlights the difference between this and a "proper" camera. This was on macro mode, so everything is out of focus except the edge of the cup.

Another nice thing about the camera is that because it has a sliding shutter on the front, it feels more like you are using a small digicam than pointing your phone at someone. oh and it has a cool little panoramic thing.

The video quality isn't as good as I hoped. This is purely because it was described by sony ericsson as "high quality" As much as I dug around, I couldn't find any information on exactly how high quality they meant. I should have known better than to expect anything more than the pixellated compressed results that you actually get - fine for postage stamp sized clips for the web, but not much else. I'll post an example at some point. Still for a phone it's not bad!

The MP3 player is great - you can set off a playlist and then minimise the app, so I have mine minimised and on pause permanently so I can just press the play/pause button on the side of the phone when I want to listen to some music. The provided headphones are also a handsfree set, and they use a proprietary plug/socket so I would need an adapter if I wanted plug any other headphones in or wire into the car stereo or anything. If I had known how good the mp3 player was I would probably have ordered a bigger memory card (only 64mb provided) before my trip to europython 2005 in sweden next week.

Mac OSX seems very unsupported as of yet, it pairs up OK via bluetooth so I can transfer files and I have used a hack for iSync to get my contacts and calendar synced up (not 100% smoothly like the T610 though). I havent got it working as a GPRS modem yet either, or SMS dial from addressbook. connecting via USB seems to work OK, mounts as a drive and charges the phone (nice unexpected bonus). I've heard reports of kernel panic when the usb is unmounted, but haven't experienced it myself yet...

my new gadget arrived, I tried to ignore it, at least until the end of the day, but all that integrated (useable) camera, (just about useable) video, (very useable) mp3 player goodness... no way.

i've made some good progress on this, as I couldn't find any "out of the box" products to do it for me. The requirement is fairly simple - when viewing an event, a logged in member should be able to subscribe to the event just by clicking a link, or remove themselves if they are already subscribed.

In a typical asp/php/jsp + relational database setup this would be done by having a table that stores member ids against event id's and scripts to add and remove the relationships as appropriate. For those of you that don't know, Zope doesn't work like that. Zope (which plone runs on top of) uses it's own object database for most content storage, rather that hooking up to a relational database (well it can, but that's not the point). Therefore the usual way to do something like this is to store the cross references as a list, tuple or dict within a field in an object instance (my terminology may be a bit out here - feel free to correct me).

Anyway, without getting too deep into that, my next challenge was that the standard event content type in plone 2.0.5 is not an archetypes content type, which makes it more tricky (for me) to monkey around with. So I installed calendaring, which has a Archetypes based replacement for Events, which handily enough already has a field for attendees. It also has loads of nice calendaring stuff (as the name suggests) including iCal import, but I won't list all of that here...

so, moving on, I created a portlet that displays when you are logged in and in the context of an event, which will list all current attendees, with a link to add yourself or remove yourself as appropriate. The links point to python scripts which are proxied to run as manager (ordinary members by default can't edit events) and this gets the attendees list (using the getAttendees method that is generated by Archetypes), converts it from a tuple to a list (because you can't manipulate tuples as I found out yesterday), adds/removes the currently logged in members id and then passes it back to the object instance using setAttendees.

This solves my problem, and i'm sure other people must have similar requirements, so I will (at some point - promise!) package this up as an installable product when i've finished it - I want to do some other things first such as looking up members names from the id's, and cleaning itself up automatically if a member is deleted.

in the meantime i'm happy to send people the code so far if they want it :)

UPDATE: i've just been pointed in the direction of this (thanks Shane), which sounds like it does pretty much what I was trying to achieve, i'd better try it out! oh well, at worst i've learnt something about manipulating linefields programatically...

I wonder how I failed to find that when I was looking before?

UPDATE 2: I installed EventRegistration and it is much more complex than what I was trying to build - to register, members would need to fill out a form rather than the "click to subscribe, click to unsubscribe" I was looking for. I am also keen to utilize the functionality that Calendaring gives me so will carry on with my product (maybe call it something like QuickSubscribePortlet ) Still useful to know about EventRegistration though.

although I pretty much managed to wean myself off buying gadgets unless I really need them, netsight are upgrading all our phones. I didn't actually think I needed a new phone, as i'm pretty chuffed with how seamlessly my current one (sony ericsson T610) works via bluetooth with my powerbook, but couldn't resist the prospect of it's grown up sibling the K750i, with amongst other things a 2 megapixel camera. So now i've gone from not wanting a new phone at all, to feeling anxiety that our new ones haven't shown up yet (tomorrow apparently!).

the downside is that iSync doesn't currently support the k750i, so i've been reading various forums where people have hacked config files etc. with varying degrees of success. I suppose another way of looking at it is that longer it takes for the phones to arrive, the more likely that people will have worked out a decent solution :-)

i'm also looking forward to using the camera - i've stopped carrying my digital camera around with me as it is just another thing to loose/break/remember, and there is virtually no point in taking pictures on my current phone, so expect a "novelty factor" surge of random experimental pictures on hypothecate for the first week or so after it arrives!

I've always got podcasts: prerecorded "radio" shows, usually in mp3 format, advertised by RSS, client software to check for updates and download to the relevant place (for some being an iPod, hence the misleading term podcast). Since I learned and understood that, i've always avoided the techie ones, reasoning that I wouldn't want to listen to people talking at length about techie issues, when I would rather read the information.

that was until I stumbled across this podcast of an interview with Rob Miller talking about the use of Plone for the extranet used for the organisation of the Burning Man festival in Nevada. It made sense because I only found it because I was googling for something else plone related, stumbled across it, and started playing it in the background whilst I carried on searching for what I was originally looking for*, and let it play in the background, absorbing the content. The content was in the form of a telephone interview (probably actually a skype conversation or similar - must try to find out), and made sense because of the radio format and the "in the background" style, rather than taking time out specifically to listen to one person talking about one subject.

*I was trying to find a product to let standard members in a standard plone site to be able to sign-up to standard events via a simple one click process (i.e attach members to events or vice versa)- all enquiries on #plone and plone-users were met with radio silence :-(

I read too much information, mostly because bloglines makes it easy for me, but coupled with the mailing lists I subscribe to (underscore being the main culprit, the only one I allow directly into my work email and read in real-time), I get to digest an excessive amount of information every day.

As a result I have no urge to read newspapers anymore, as they always seem way out of date - the same information arrives digitally on my screen almost as soon as it happens. I'm also still sticking to my self imposed ban on buying magazines, so the advertisers aren't getting to me as much as they would like :-)

UPDATE: someone just posted this to underscore about 2 minutes after I posted this - a hack to make firefox confront you after 5 minutes of aimless surfing, so you have to justify your case for continuing

I read through these presentation notes earlier on Jeremy Keiths "using javascript for good not evil" presentation. He has some valuable advice about how to get round the problem of leaving useless href links full of # and javascript calls that make no sense if javascript is turned off. I won't reproduce it here - have a look the the notes.

On a seperate (but related) subject, how nice it is that the presentation is in lovely S5 format - it's refreshing to not to be pointed at a powerpoint file! Can't remember whether i've already blogged it but there is a Plone product which willl turn a standard plone document into an s5 presentation, with the start of each slide being defined by a heading.

hooray! I've finally understood why the plone tableless skin uses negative margins in the CSS - it is to get round the inabilty to specify a width of something like (100% - 16em) in CSS.

I did start to write up a full explanation, but then closed my browser before saving it, which is just as well, because it is much better explained by this article.

Hopefully now I understand it, it won't spring apart like a clowns car the second I adjust some padding :-)

so the @media 2005 conference came and went without me. I've read some write-ups and looked at the pictures on flickr, and although it looked good, I didn't get the missing out feeling I got about SxSWi. I have to admit that this has little or nothing to do with the content of the conference, but more that the appeal to me is really the geek socialising and - hate to say the word - networking that goes with them, and the idea of doing that in the various bars and restuarants of downtown Austin, Texas appeals more than doing the same in London. Because i've been to London loads of times, there's just no novelty involved.

there seems to be a sort of "standards geek" celebrity occuring for the main bloggers/authors/designers involved in these events. some of them giving talks, some of them just hanging out, blogging and taking photographs...

netdiver finally has an RSS feed :-) I say finally, but they may have had it for months, but I stopped reading it because ... err.. they didn't have an RSS feed

I haven't posted on this page for some time, in fact i'd forgotten that it existed at all! The laptop now has a dead screen and no battery, and I really only keep it as a backup. Last week I installed ubuntu linux "hoary hedgehog" and it went on fine - I think it even recognised the sound card, but i'll get back to you on that, as I didn't have any sound files to test it with.

as expected it didn't recognise the pcmcia network card, but as i've got that working before on other linux distro's i'm confident that it I can get it to work.

I took an export of a plone 2.0.5 site from a win xp pro machine and tried to import it into a fresh plone 2.0.5 on a win 2k machine. it failed with following error:-

com_error: (-2147221005, 'Invalid class string', None, None)

I then tried copying data.fs over instead and this worked but on viewing the site certain plone help center items that used word document file upload for the content failed with the same error.

googling around I found references to win32 and com and general office related references. so I tried installing office on the windows 2000 machine, and now it works.

i'm no windows/ com expert but I guess it is related to office upgrading the com "stuff"

I decided to sign up at flickr and have a bit of an experiment. I'm going under discipleofsketch (a reference to my old "skate crew" back in the daze). I've hardly put any photos up, as I was just seeing with how it works really - trying out an iphoto plugin. so anyway I uploaded a few skate ones and had the idea of starting a middle age shred tag. I then went onto the forum and encouraged other people to do the same, as a central place for people to upload stuff. I love the way flickr creates friendly urls for views on specific tags and members, e.g photos tagged with the middle age shred tag (middleageshred) can be viewed at http://flickr.com/photos/tags/middleageshred/.

Another cool feature is that it generates an RSS feed for each tag and person too :-)

I nearly spat out my coffee... as usual went to the "usual suspects" tab, selected "Bloglines" and instead of my usual alladins cave of new information that I don't need to know, gathered from websites I wouldn't ususally bother to look at, I get this messge:-

Hi,

I'm the Bloglines Plumber. Bloglines is down for a little fixer upper. We'll now be back at 3 Am Pacific Time. Bloglines will be all better when I'm done with it.

Thanks,
The Bloglines Plumber

why you...... well that's all very well mr bloglines plumber, seeing as you provide the service for free, but where just where am I going to get my surplus information fix from until then? Do you expect me to actually visit all those websites? do you expect me to even remember which websites I read on a daily basis? Do you expect me to put up with proactively visiting websites on the off-chance that they might have updated since I last looked, rather than sitting back and letting you check them for me and feed me all that lovely information? How am I going to manage until 3am pacific time (whatever that translates to in GMT)?

So I decided to treat myself to a coffee in Rocatillos, and am taking the opportunity to try out StreetNet <- I would post a link to their homepage, but oddly can't find it! I've only just got reception as i'm a bit up the hill from the official zone, but after being diverted to a questionnaire it let me on the web.

The questionnaire was quite amusing as I had to tick "other" for nearly everything as it didn't include checkboxes for "blogging geek" or "blogging skateboarder celebrating one year of skating to work"

I suppose I should also be celebrating one year at netsight, seeing as it wasn't a coincidence about the skating work starting at the same time as the new job. I should also get myself into work (about 1 minute round the corner).

I've been seeing loads of media hype about E3 (the games expo, not the bristol digital media agency of the same name, where I used to work a few years ago, coincidentally), and I feel completely indifferent to it - i'm just not into games. This goes back to childhood really, I was never into ballsports preferring "action-sports" such as riding my Raleigh Strika over old car tyres, and although i've spent a few hours over the years playing computer games on various devices ranging from an early atari console to a zx spectrum, I currently can't get excited about them, which is just as well really, given that I don't actually have enough spare time to do the things I am enthusiastic about...

tomorrow it will be exactly one year since I first skateboarded to work - I may celebrate with a veggie breakfast (or at least a coffee) at rocatillos, like the first time. I think i've only actually had breakfast there about 3 times in total, which is just as well, because at about £5 a pop, I would have spent somewhere in the region of a grand over the year if I had been in every time I commuted to work atop my boardskate...