Processing is one of those things I keep on coming across, first through toy hackers such as krazydad, ni [video] and The Curiosity Collective and more recently in Maker articles and O’Reilly books such as Vizualizing Data and Making Things Talk. I’d even invested in the rather heavy Processing, Creative Coding and Computational Art, all totally inspiring, and yet I somehow hadn’t got around to actually doing anything with it. You see it’s the whole Java thing that puts me off; life is far too short to wrangle a CLASSPATH or compile an applet.

So, it was great to see the amazing John Resig finally release his native Javascript implementation Processing.js. To allow easy experimention, I’ve wrapped John’s code into a TiddlyWiki Plugin, which took all of 10 minutes thanks to the prior art of Simon Baird’s cool clock. It took a little longer to knife and fork John’s basic examples into a TiddlyProcessing TiddlyWiki [subversion], mainly because his server was being hammered.

The result is a single HTML page you can double click on an example to view the Processing source, edit it, and see the results immediately without refreshing the page. Download and reopen it in Firefox and you’ll be able to save your changes locally. Not all the examples work, in particular those which use external images. You can save your changes in other browsers if you follow the generic TiddlyWiki instructions. .

All great fun, but it is just a hack, and I somehow doubt the purveyors of more complete bids for global vendor lock-in, such as Silverlight and AIR, are too worried as yet. But they should be. A combination of video as a first class citizen of the Web, Canvas in decent browsers and libraries and emulations using SVG elsewhere seems pretty close to being good enough. As much as I’d love to see more declarative approaches take off, I can’t help but think we’ve entered the age of the canvas!

Technorati Tags: Processing, Processingjs, TiddlyWiki

Another year, and another quiz sheet for our local school Spring Fair. The theme of this year’s fair is “The Beijing Olympic Games”. Sigh! So each picture represents a game. A board game. Hmm. And it’s not as cryptic as previous years. Double hmmm. As usual, I’ll post the answers after the prize draw. Have Fun!

Technorati Tags: Berkhamsted, quiz

Much of yesterday was spent implicitly pondering the difference between a Mashup and an Integration. The question cropped up in conversation with Gareth, but came to a head as the Osmosoftonians investigated the use of TiddlyWiki to add an offline experience to an internal system only a vendor account manager could love. Coincidentally, JP was also yesterday musing about enterprise information and flow, from which my take is the blog is very enterprisey when charted on a diagram, but that’s all hidden, dynamic loosely connected, plumbing. It’s a convoluted route when drawn out in plan, but the result of the power of hyperlinks: you don’t need a map to construct a Web-flow, you just follow the signs.

As a result, I’m pretty sure there isn’t a knife-edge, a nonconstructive proof, but when considering calling something a mashup, you might like to ask the following questions:

• Is everything “zero touch”, that is, can you get to your data without having to engage in a dialog with some jobsworth to ask for permission, open up a channel, send you documentation, add users, test data, whatever?
• Can you play around with the data, view it in a browser without worrying about accidently firing nuclear missiles? In other words, is it safe?
• Is the site stable? Can you send a link to a page to someone else and they, assuming they have access, see the same data? Are the Web pages bookmarkable? That is, does the site use cool URIs?
• Is the data available in an open, easily parseable form, HTML with Microformats, Atom, JSON, XML, etc
• Does the site eschew so called rich user experiences such as Flash, Silverlight, AIR, and other proprietary nonsense when presenting data?
• can you access the data from a HTML form, or with a drop of Javascript in a browser, without having to download Jar, War, Ear, DLL, PEAR, Eggs or other SDK like stuff?
• Are the URIs accessible from The Web, visible to services such as Dapper, Yahoo! Pipes, Google Maps, i.e. don’t involve NAT, WINS or other scoped addresses which only make sense behind a firewall?
• Do the words “SOA”, “EAI”, “SOAP”, “WSDL”, or heaven forbid “BPEL” crop up during conversation, except within bunny quotes and followed by sniggers?
• To protect private data, does the site use OAuth, OpenID, a simple digest scheme or even Username, password and cookies rather than some complex, probably federated, security method for access control?
• Does it solve a problem for you personally, scratch your itch or help someone you know and care about, rather than being a prospective development to fulfill someone else’s perceived requirements for their ideal “user”?
• Would you ever consider developing the idea yourself, you know, just for the fun of it?

If the answer to some of the above is “no”, in particular the first and last ones, then you have an integration on your hands. Bad luck. It’s going to be expensive, and certainly not pretty.

Bumper sticker: Mashup fun? No need to ask!

I’m really pleased Tim, “The Man With No URI”, has started blogging, and already has pushed out some great posts. I will try and answer some of the points raised by the topical Onwards Delegation Problem, but was diverted by Tim’s aside:

B-oo-kk-ee-p-e-r incidentally, is the only word in the English language I’m aware of with three double letters in a row. I’d love to be shown others…

Unix boxes ship with a words file, which on my Mac has 234,936 entries, and a quick grep:

egrep '(.)\1(.)\2(.)\3' /usr/share/dict/words

revealed:

bookkeeper
bookkeeping
subbookkeeper

Scraping Wiktionary:

for i in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
do
    curl http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:English/$i
done |
    grep '<li><a href="/wiki/' |
    sed 's/^.*title=\(.\)\(.*\)\1.*$/\2/' > words

gave 72,018 words, with no plurals, but still only revealed “bookkeeper”.

There are a bunch of open word lists around the Web, many harvested from Gutenberg, but Moby Words, having 619,361 words and claiming to be “the largest word list in the world“, could only come up with:

assistant bookkeeper
bookkeep
bookkeeper
bookkeeper's
bookkeepers
bookkeeping
bookkeepings
bookkeeps
double-entry bookkeeping
single-entry bookkeeping
subbookkeeper

Oh well, I did at least try.

Update: please note this and the Ten Commandments were written firmly tongue-in-cheek, that I’m biassed, but I’m OK for Twerps to be Twerps, and recognise we all tend to be a bit of both at times. Please also note in UK English “Twit” and “Twerp” are equally derogatory, and both are often used as an affectionate mild rebuke, mother to son. Enjoy!

Ruminating on Twitter constraints, I see two kinds of Twitterers emerging: Twits and Twerps.

A Twit sees Twitter as a presence service. Twits love the ambient intimacy twitter affords with their friends, and tweet to build a meaningful permanent record. They strive to entertain, to be profound. Twits are often interested in adding metadata such as tags, plusplus and locations which may be farmed, searched and annotated later. A twit uses an @reply primarily to reference a user for the benefit of their other followers, and use a direct message to communicate with someone where their followers are unlikely to be interested in the conversation. A twit is always considerate to their followers, knowing that each message may potentially be SMS’d to hundreds of people. Twits always think about the question “What are you doing?”. A good twit will make you laugh, make you cry but above all feel connected. Exemplar Twits include @hicksdesign, @arielwaldman, @ev, @missrogue, @factoryjoe and @natbat, and most everyone I follow. Canonical Twit tweets:

• contractions, more contractions, ouchie!, but still no baby 12:20 PM November 23, 2007
• impressed by the genteel taste of @roessler’s train ride/coffee sipping/music as I crank bass-ass ROCK! and drink cold coffee for breakie 07:01 AM December 21, 2007
• #foodporn happy ‘cos I is eating lard. Well, lovely big fat hot fish n’ chips from “Rock & Sole Plaice” L:47 Endell St, WC2H 9AA about 6 hours ago
• Thinking about buying stock in ibuprofen and vitC companies. Wading through 1000’s of emails from the past 5 days. But happy to be better. 22 minutes ago
• Just watched The Manchurian Candidate (2004 version). Liked it. Didn’t realise the original was just 1 year before JFK’s assassination 32 minutes ago
• Figuring: If I’m in writing mode, I should just keep writing. 36 minutes ago

See, you probably don’t know these people, but you can’t fail but empathise with them. Fun, isn’t it?

A Twerp sees Twitter as a conversation. It’s irc, only with free SMS thrown in. Most twerp updates start with an @ and are meaningless unless you too are a twerp. Twerps often follow 1000’s, because that’s the best way of dealing with other twerps and seeing their asynchronous replies. A Twerp will reference someone whose updates are locked with something like “@BigTwerp cool!”, which is like “the f-ing letter K!” [video, 17:34 in], only it’s twitter and 100’s of people around the world paying. Really inconsiderate twerps use services such as seesmic to pump noise at their followers, repeatedly trumpet blog postings, endlessly muse on how they rock. They see twitter as just another way to “up their ante”. Twerps often fail to embrace twitter’s 140 character limit; they’re writing memos when they should be writing Haikus. To a twit, a twerp’s updates are just intrusive line noise. Phil put it well when he said:

Following @gapingvoid and @Scobleizer is like listening to one end of a phone conversation. When they’re on a conference call.

As a result it’s much easier to be a Twerp following a Twit than vice-versa. As you will have realised, I aspire to be a good twit, but am OK with twerps because I prefer to live and let live and have a simple rule: don’t follow them! I also feel twerps are inevitable given Downey’s first law of protocols which states:

any message path which abstracts away underlying transports is doomed to have them reinvented in extensions

Witness SOAP which by processing messages regardless of how they are delivered led to WS-*, and Twitter, not having a way of conversing spawned the @ reply, the power behind the twerp, leading to Downey’s first law of social networks:

a conversation may indeed leak onto any channel good enough to carry one

So the rise of the twerps was inevitable. however, other twits feel differently, formulating The Twitter 10 Commandments. Ignore these and you are most definitely a twerp!

Update: 10 commandments are now here, in stone, as a twitter user, so you can “follow tencommandments“.

Technorati Tags: Twitter

I really enjoyed the presentation at LeWeb3 from Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter. Ev said some powerful things, not least:

we’re used to asking the question, “what features can we add to make something better” .. but I’m a fan of another question at the start of a product cycle “What can we take away to create something new”.

As a sometime advocate of Twitter, I was stoked to have an opportunity to ask a question:

LoicLeMeur

Can you introduce yourself?

psd

yeah, sure! I’m Paul Downey. I’m psd on Twitter. I love Twitter! It’s a big part of my life, [blush!] and I want to thank you for that!

ev

thank you.

psd

Something I’m noticing amongst my followers and my friends that we’re descending into using Twitter like irc and that kills the SMS experience. Nanolanguages are forming a bit like chants in a football crowd. A good example might be the L: tag, and the hash, and the at, which I love, but the problem is they’re becoming very intrusive and are spoiling that “What are You Doing?” experience. How can you stop that from spoiling Twitter?

ev

That’s a good question! One of the interesting things that’s happened with features that Twitter didn’t have, was people made up their own syntax to make up for that and it turned out people really wanted to converse, so they made up this @ reply syntax. So people put in this @ symbol and a username to reply to someone else’s Twitter, but that goes out to everybody that is following the sender of that, but may not be following the person they’re replying to, and it gets confusing, and some of these other syntaxes that you are mentioning are having a similar effect where instead of the pure Twitter message that maybe the update from the person sending it, it’s becoming overwhelming. So what we did in the case of the @replies is introduce a feature that gave you a little more control of whether you get those @replies and I don’t know if we offer the ability to not get them over SMS and only get them on the Web but that would be a good feature to add.

psd

So I think embracing the nanoformats and making more control, adding more to the interface would be useful.

ev

Yes, so that’s the line we’re walking now. I think you can start out very simply and add stuff, and it’s inevitable you’ll need to add stuff. What we like to do is follow our users and see what is needed and I think we’re adding stuff like the @replies feature which we never even designed in there and we’re now accounting for that. And there are several other things we can offer. I would like to give a lot more control over what you get over SMS. That should address that problem.

I edited out all the ums and ers, I was unusually nervous as you can tell from the video, 10:30 minutes in.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, LeWeb3

As someone who previously poured scorn on someone calling themselves a futurologist, I surprised myself by being disappointed by a dearth of predictions on the blogsphere this New Year. So here’s my attempt to fix this, and keep Kerry company. Whilst reading this tosh, please note that I’m working on the William Gibson principle that the future is already with us, it’s just unevenly distributed. So this doesn’t account for Black Swans. Also being something of a complete Pollyanna there are no Storm Botnets or tales from the dark side in my rather swirly Vision of The Web in 2008:

Site Specific Browsers

Forget the lockin promised by Rich Internet Applications no matter how shiny they might be, and to some extent ignore widgets and gadgets, the darlings of the moment and look out for some really cool site specific browsers. Adding a sandbox to get around security concerns and a support for offline with some cluey caching to the likes of Prism or Fluidapp and you’ve something more than good enough!

Lifestreaming

We’ve had glimpses of this pattern in Jaiku, onaswarm, lifestre.am and Facebook’s attention stream, but if you jam all your feeds into one page, and then add all your friends’ feeds, the result isn’t all that compelling. I can’t quite believe APML is the magic sieve which will make lifestreaming useable, but have no doubt this area will see interesting advances in 2008.

Open Data

Following from lifestreaming, that rich ‘mericans motivated to put their bank account details into a single web site just to make sense of their worth, comes as a surprise to many in blighty. We’ll continue to hear from people demanding ready access to their own data. Bigcorp, you might think of yourself as the custodian of my bills, appointments, phone records, texts and phone messages but it’s my data, and I want it as iCal, Atom, JSON or XML, thankyouverymuch!

Social Networks

Once people are motivated to collect their streams in one place, then we might finally see social networking aggregation rather than portability. I’m still waiting to see what Kevin and Brad are really working on as I still can’t really believe Open Social was it. I’m betting some simpler patterns will emerge for combining OAuth with XFN to slurp your contacts into a new app, Dopplr style.

Identity

Along with Vista, the WS-* trojan horse that is Cardspace was received with a global meh. Pointless point-to-point Federation will continue to be ignored whilst OpenID in version 2 will continue to make progress as people finally realise authentication doesn’t always have to equate to trust and URIs are people too.

Towards VRM

Searching for anything to do with games results in pages of splogs containing Google and other splash ads. Someone is paying for this nonsense, and yes it’s us when we buy stuff. Maybe with advances in Identity, Social Networks and delegation it will be possible to start turning the tables on CRM with Vendor Relationship Management, and you know everyone will be the happier for it.

Eventing

In 2007 we saw the power of combining feeds, pipes, with Twitter’s abstracted address book, presence done right, feeds and cool URI for every message. Twitter continues to be the one to watch precisely because of its simple Web exposure and constraints in the just the right places. As for more responsive eventing, watch out for more on comet and XMPP. As for ESB? YAGNI!

Programming Languages

Ruby?, Erlang?, Scala? Rebol? C# 3.0? (ha-ha!) Nope, this year I be mostly hacking Javascript!

iPhone

In spite of one of the best talks at this year’s great Future of Web Apps repeatedly using the popularity of my sucky phone as an example of why mobile web development is so hard, I haven’t been bitten by my desire for an iPhone, mainly due to it being closed platform and not 3G, and not having GPS. An iPhone with all three would truly be a game changer. Fingers crossed.

Open Source

Strategy used to be the process of looking at your suppliers, putting your eggs in one basket or trying to divine some kind of lowest common denominator across a set of vendor roadmaps. Adoption of standards were seen as the best way of ensuring you could switch suppliers. With Open Source that’s no longer the case. As everyone now knows, innovation happens elsewhere, and in 2007 that was from a myriad of small but significant Open Source projects. In a nutshell: “Vendor led is now dead“. This year will continue to witness the snapping up bright things who’ve taken the industry forward, demonstrating software skills in the open, often from the comfort of their bedroom. We’ll also see enterprise developers realising often the best way to achieve widespread adoption of infrastructure code within their own company, as well as reducing the cost of maintenance and support, is by releasing Open Source. One area this still remains a challenge is in the field of design. Agile development and Open Source haven’t always led to good user interfaces or experiences, so I’m hoping 2008 will see better understanding of why The inmates shouldn’t continue to run the asylum. That’s certainly something we’re thinking about a lot over in Osmosoft.

WS-Splat

My 2007 was punctuated by a series of frank farewells to the silly world of Web services. Sadly for some still stuck in the Enterprise Software Swamps, the debate apparently rumbles on, but for me in 2008, the war is over, and beyond wrapping up the databinding work, I won’t be sullied with SOAP, or its stupid squabbling, and I’m so happy about that!

Facebook–

They hit the big time in 2007 by opening up deservedly grabbing significant attention, then made a whole bunch of mistakes, and yet we’re all still there. With Beacon demonstrated how they only see us as captive eyeballs on adverts. As Doc Searls nicely put it “advertising used to be about bullshit in your face, now your face is bullshit”. They’ll continue to learn and slowly reinvent themselves, we’ve seen a little of this already with the welcome data feeds and back-peddling on content-free bacn, but as long as they try to lock you in by owning your “graph”, they’re doomed to be replaced by someone more deserving of our trust.

Bubble Pop

Finally, a rather wishful goodbye to the schismatic influence of TechCrunch and the current crop of similar egocentric commentators. It’s somehow ironic how much of Web 2.0’s supposedly wise crowd can’t fail but unthinkingly echolalia the agenda of the so-called ‘A’ list bloggers. I’m sure they’re all super-nice guys, but PR Bullshit 2.0 is still PR Bullshit and you know that when the bubble pops, it’ll be all over their faces.

Hope you like the drawing, and the hyperlink DOS attack that is this post. Happy New Year!

I’m a sucker for good meme, so here’s my 2008 themeword:

fillip

1. something which excites or stimulates.
2. somthing trivial or of little importance
3. to click your fingers
4. to flick or strike an object rapidly

Via Chris

is a flickr photo set automatically generated using the quite interesting dopiaza.org tool.

Technorati Tags: Flickr

I’ve been enjoying BBC Radio4’s ipm, in particular the intelligent coverage of Facebook. On today’s programme, online campaigner Johnny Chatterton and admin of the Support the Monks’ protest in Burma Group provided positive balance to Seamus McCauley’s claim Facebook had jumped the shark. No news here for readers of this blog, but great to hear a clear explanation issues such as Beacon (disassembly, video) on mainstream media. I particularly liked Sean’s pointer to the not for profit kaioo.

For my part, I want to side with Johnny and think this is a glitch, something from which the young, gung-ho Facebook will learn, but like Sean can’t help but think Facebook has lost sight of what it’s selling it has created: a safe, trusted domain where people can meet. Many big companies blithely believe they have a trusted brand, forgetting how trust arises. I trust a bank over a Christmas savings club mostly thanks to regulation, but even with a bank trust is a fickle friend. It only takes one wrong move to see a run. Try to exploit an informal gathering for the benefit of sharks, the music will stop, and the party will move on. Ironically, by successfully connecting so many people, and keeping social objects such as photos and videos hidden from the Web, Facebook has made the jump to the next thing all the more easy.

The program is currently available as a podcast, with the item running for 5 minutes from 7:07 minutes in.

Technorati Tags: Facebook