minus zero

I bought a new camera at the weekend, a Praktica MTL 5 from eBay. I spent the weekend taking photos with Dad's LTL 3 and I realised how much more fun a Real Camera is than my Lumix digital camera. The Prakticas are by no means top of the range, but there's something satisfying about the clunkiness of the shutter release and fiddling with loading a film into the back.

I'm a bit late to the party, but Enter Shikari are fantastic - a fun blend of post-hardcore + trance that sounds like it's going to take them into orbit. And they've shunned major label interest to release their debut album themselves, a bold move indeed.

SUCS has organised a lightning talks session next Tuesday, and I've been coerced into giving a talk... I guess I ought to work out WTF I'm going to fill 10 minutes with now.

Reading a paper today, I came across the following usage scenario:

"You are a commuter walking through Euston station in London and your train has been delayed. You suddenly receive a challenge on your mobile phone informing you that there are 40 Green UrbanSwarmers and 25 Red UrbanSwarmers distributed nearby. You have already signed up as a Red player, so you decide to take up the challenge and participate even though you are outnumbered this time. Using the awareness features on your device and carefully observing the people around you, you manage to find another four Reds. You team up to follow unsuspecting Greens and spread Red around. Then a large group of people emerges from the crowd walking quickly in your direction: they are Greens! Instinctively, you all run to avoid them and rush towards the Underground to 'hide' in the wireless signal-free area. The Green swarm won't follow you there. You relax and chat with the people you just played with, exchanging your UrbanSwarmer details. Two of them are taking the same train as you and it is now time to go!"

While this is a nice idea, and would be fun, in today's climate of fear a group of people chasing each other around a station are likely to be arrested, or worse, shot.

So today Steve Jobs took to the stage to deliver one of his customary 'Stevenotes' at the Macworld Expo, and now everyone (myself included, admittedly) is salivating over the Apple TV and the iPhone. While these two announcements certainly are good news, what interested me was the information Apple didn't make available.

Starting with the Apple TV, a couple of questions spring to mind:

• What Intel CPU does it use?
  The Tech specs page for the Apple TV claims it uses an Intel processor, but it declines to reveal exactly which model it uses. Arguably, it's not really important, because the device runs a specific set of programs and performs a limited number of tasks, so the speed of the chip isn't relevant as long as it can do these things fast enough. Nevertheless, it's curious that we're left none the wiser. Maybe OS X is now running on a 3^rd architecture, one now shared between the Apple TV and the iPhone.
• What OS does it run?
  After all the emphasis placed on the iPhone running OS X, it's odd that there's no mention of the platform in use on the Apple TV. At a guess I'd say it's a stripped-down OS X similar to that employed by the iPhone.
• Can it run 3^rd party applications?
  Will we see custom programs on the device at some point in the future? Judging by how Apple have handled games on the iPod, it's unlikely, but it could happen. How long until we see Linux on it? :)

The iPhone looks like an amazing piece of kit, but there were a few things missing from the announcement:

• Real system specs
  How much RAM does this thing have? What processor does it use? What about the 3D capabilities? Judging by the shiny graphics and the fact that it's got Cover Flow, it's clearly got some kind of 3D acceleration.
• What does 'Operating System: OS X' actually mean?
  So we've been told that the iPhone runs OS X, but how much OS X functionality does it actually have? Obviously the interface is very different from the familiar face of OS X that we've seen on notebooks and desktops previously, but what about under the hood? Does it still have the BSD subsystem? Are all the applications we've seen built with Cocoa?
• Does it run custom applications?
  For me, this is the big one. If this thing is anywhere near as capable of running user-developed applications as Macs and Windows Mobile-powered Pocket PCs and smartphones, it's going to cause me to run out into the street and fall to the floor screaming with glee. I've not (yet) used Xcode for any serious development, but my experience with it so far has been extremely pleasant.
  Visual Studio, for all its faults, does provide a seamless platform for developing and deploying mobile applications on .NET PDAs. The prospect of being able to develop for the iPhone in Xcode and use Cocoa and all its shiny bits is something that really appeals to me, and I'd make the switch from Visual Studio in a heartbeat.
• Why no 3G?
  Maybe the 3G revolution really hasn't arrived here or in the USA yet, but considering the emphasis placed on internet access on this phone, I'm surprised that it doesn't have a faster connection. On the other hand, I don't know an awful lot about mobile phone networks, so perhaps this point is irrelevant.

I'm sure I had more points to add to this, but I just started watching the keynote stream and now I'm getting distracted...

Overall, I'm damn excited about the iPhone, and as soon as it's released over here (and I can actually afford the damn thing), I'm going to grab one.

Just another day in the FIT Lab...

I have a research topic!

After spending a couple of months wading through research papers and trying to get a feel for the area, I've settled on 'discovering music on the move' as the area of mobile HCI that I'm going to concentrate my PhD research efforts on. There seems to be a lot of activity in the areas of creating and consuming music in a mobile context, but I've not (yet) found much that deals specifically with the joy of discovering a new band, song, or genre of music. Now I've got to knuckle down and read everything there is to read, and then write a literature review by January 15^th... Eek.

In other news, the Annual SUCS Christmas Party is taking place tomorrow at the House of Geek. I'm looking forward to it, although I can't help but wonder how it's going to differ to last year's gatherings now that people such as Steve, Jo, Tudor, Darren etc. have moved away. Photos on Friday!

As part of the No Grownups seminar series, I gave a presentation on Friday about my experience in Google's Summer of Code 2005 program.

The talk went fairly well, although I should have spent more time preparing, and should have given the talk a practice run at least once... I had 20 slides that were meant to last ~20 minutes, but ended up rushing through them and finished within 10 minutes... Oops! There were lots of questions at the end though, which meant I ended up speaking for 25 minutes in total.

I find myself getting extremely nervous before these sorts of things, but normally once I start speaking the jitters evaporate. At least, that's how it seems to me while I'm stood up there talking... Perhaps from the audience's point of view I'm a nervous mumbling wreck!

In case you're interested, the slides are available.

...and neither is this blog!

It's been a long time in the making, but I've finally managed to get my shiny, newly-written blog system to the point where I think I can get away with running it on the internets. Welcome to the all new minus zero blog. I fully intend to maintain a regular flow of updates, although I can't promise any of them will be worth reading. :)

There are a few missing features that I'm still working on - namely, comments on posts, an archive page, and some form of search functionality. Stay tuned!

You'll notice the shiny new design is a lot nicer than the old one - see the main page for an explanation of where it came from.

That's all for now! I'd love to hear any comments, thoughts, or suggestions you might have - email me!

I stopped working on pyBackPack a long time ago. The final year of my degree didn't leave a lot of spare time for hacking on the code, and it fell by the wayside.

Now, however, my good friend Andy Price has picked up the torch, and is going to continue pyBackPack's development. He's taken ownership of the code, and I've detached myself from it officially. Andy's created a project page, and the bug tracker and SVN systems are up and running. I've set up redirects on my website so all old links should be sent to the right places - please let me know if anything doesn't work any more.

Best of luck to Andy!

While working on a forthcoming project (watch this space...), I decided it'd be a lot easier to test the code on my local machine rather than SUCS's server.

Tiger (yes, I'm a Mac user these days) comes with Apache 1.3, which is rather outdated, so I looked into updating to a more recent release. Fink has Apache 2.0, but I decided to go all-out and try and get Apache 2.2 running. It turned out to be relatively easy.

Here's my setup:

• OS X 10.4.7 on an Apple MacBook
• XCode 2.3
• Python 2.4.3 from python.org

First of all, we need to get Apache compiled and installed.

$ wget http://www.mirror.ac.uk/mirror/ftp.apache.org/httpd/httpd-2.2.3.tar.gz
$ tar zxf httpd-2.2.3.tar.gz
$ cd httpd-2.2.3
$ ./configure --with-mpm=worker --enable-so
$ make
$ sudo make install

That should install Apache into /usr/local/apache2.

Next, download and compile mod_python:

$ wget http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.apache.org/httpd/modpython/mod_python-3.2.10.tgz
$ tar zxf mod_python-3.2.10.tgz
$ cd mod_python-3.2.10
$ ./configure --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs --with-python=/usr/local/bin/python
$ make
$ sudo make install

That'll build mod_python and put the appropriate files in /usr/local/apache2/modules.

Configuring our newly-compiled Apache to replace OS X's default one is easy enough - a few changes to /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf and extra/httpd-userdir.conf is all it takes. Download an archive with all the necessary patch files here. Note - these configuration changes don't cause Apache 2 to behave exactly like Tiger's Apache 1.3, and there may be parts I've overlooked that could be exploited.

To apply the patches, run the following as root (from the directory with the extracted contents of the archive):

# patch /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf httpd.conf.patch
# cp httpd-userdir.conf /usr/local/apache2/conf/extra/.

By now, you should have a working Apache 2 setup on your Mac, but how can we make it start at boot? This is relatively easy - we can use /Library/StartupItems to accomplish this. The zip file contains the files you need to put in this directory to automate Apache's startup.

Unzip the archive and then cp -r Apache2 /Library/StartupItems/. as root.

That's it! To get the server started, you can run sudo /sbin/SystemStarter start "Web Server" and then browse to http://localhost/ to test your new Apache installation! And then, of course, you can dive into the world of Python.

Update - 26^th Jan '07: I had cause to reinstall Apache on a new machine, and the above instructions work perfectly with Apache 2.2.4, mod_python 3.3.0b and Python 2.5. The only change required, apart from the differences in filenames, is to change /usr/local/bin/python to /usr/local/bin/python2.5 on the configure line of the mod_python build stage.

Announcing my latest product of procrastination - pyClick 0.1

pyClick is a pseudo-driver for the Griffin AirClick USB for Linux. It's written in Python, and provides a mapping between keys on the AirClick remote and running user-configurable commands on the PC. By default, it is set up to control a media player such as Rhythmbox or Banshee by simulating X keypresses.

Get it now!