Bruce Sterling is doing the rounds in London at the moment: I caught him on Monday at a New Statesman event upstairs at the Grouse and Claret. Bruce gave a highly entertaining ‘cyberpunk exegesis’ of a bewildering array of contemporary issues and ideas: the UK’s surveillance culture, Web 2.0, Climate Change and of course the Internet of Things to name just a few. Good ‘names’ for things seem more important than ever now: Bruce mentioned that Tim O’Reilly - who coined the term Web 2.0 - has an English degree, so “he’s good at naming things”, and in his design/tech book ‘Shaping Things’, Bruce stresses that the ability to take on a name, an identity is one of the key features of a ’spime’ (a Sterling neologism: an object that exists in space and time):

…the means of production [of third-stage objects] are re-engineered around a capacity for identity. The object becomes an instantiation of identity. It’s named, and it broadcasts its name, then it can be tracked. That’s a spime.

It used to be that we more often looked to sci-fi novelists like Bruce or William Gibson (who ‘invented’ cyberspace) for neologisms to help us track the tech world, but now it seems the industry does a pretty good job of this itself (think Web 2.0, or its sometime namesake Ajax which can be broadcast and tracked so much more easily now it’s no longer XMLHttpRequest). I guess this is also why Bruce describes himself now as an “industry booster” as well as a novelist and why he’s admits he’s had to keep rewriting his novel about spimes over the last few years, as reality keeps changing faster than it can be imagined.

Something that could really benefit from a new name though is ‘climate change’, a name that would go on to help create (Viridian’s) ‘irresistible demand for a global atmosphere upgrade’, in the same way that merely the idea of Web 2.0 (or any other technology that “sounded good on a golf course”) is fuelling so many irresistible demands.

Some links: Podcast of the New Statesman event (and Dave Phelan’s notes). Bruce Sterlings’s ETech keynote on the Internet of Things. Julian Bleecker’s Manifesto for Networked Things (pdf). Ulla-Maaria Mutanen (of Craft Manifesto fame)’s ThingLinks.

Nokia Research recently announced the Apache webserver had been ported to run on S60 phones (see my earlier post). The plan had been to “bring a full-fledged webserver to S60 and to make a webserver running on a mobile phone accessible from the Internet using any web browser”. Now the client binary is available for download and you can sign up for an account on Nokia’s gateway and try this for yourself.

Here’s Apache running on my N70.

(I recently upgraded to the N70 from the 6630: I wasn’t sure whether to wait for a S60 3rd Edition phone but in the end the 2 megapixel slide-and-shoot camera, the flash and larger memory won me over even if the tiny keyboard and all-blue backlighting is a considerable step in the wrong direction, usability-wise).

From the Read Me:

Raccoon consists of two parts: a Symbian port of the Apache httpd webserver and a “connector” that together with a gateway provides a mobile phone with a global name in the operator networks of today. In short, you can now host a website on your mobile phone that is accessible from any web browser on the Internet.

There is a lot of (demo) functionality to explore: “there are custom modules for accessing the core functionality of the phone - camera, contacts, favourites, log and messages - and modules for sending instant and inbox messages to the phone, and a module for finding mobile websites in the proximity”.

Now that I’ve got this up and running I guess I need to get to work on my mobsite.

(via Tommi’s S60 applications blog)

About the only good thing to result from the theft of my bag just before Christmas was replacing my ageing original 1G iPod with a sleek new black 5G video iPod (whoever thought that glossy white ‘iBook’ look was a good idea?). Actually that’s not strictly true: I’ve effectively ‘upgraded’ many of my closest and most familiar possessions at the cost of many hours cancelling credit cards, talking to insurers and replacing missing Christmas gifts.

What has really surprised me however, is how much I’m enjoying video on the move. Just today I was watching the 1969 ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ film (recently made available on Google Video, along with a number of other NASA History of Space Flight Motion Pictures), watching Neil or maybe Buzz shaving on the 3-day flight to the moon. The commentary describes this as ‘housekeeping’ whilst I was thinking ‘why bother?’ before I realised I’d just missed my stop on the tube.

Shaving on the way to the moon
Originally uploaded by Rob Bevan.

My wait for the return train was just enough time for the best sequence - the Eagle’s descent to the surface of the moon - which actually just reminded me of all the times I’ve peered out of the the window of a plane (I always watch) as it lands: there’s that long wait as the plane seems to hover interminably just above the ground before touching down. This is usually the only moment I get a little tense whilst flying, unlike my mate Tim who pretty much feels that way the entire flight. (He was so visibly distressed when we flew to Glasgow once that one of the cabin crew came over to find out if he was going to be OK, and tried to comfort him with “don’t worry - we’re the lucky crew!”, which understandably made things worse.) I’m constantly on the lookout at the moment for moon-related material to pass on to Tim for his ‘golf on the moon’ project: clearly he’s going to have to deal with his fear of flying first.

And just because this is doing the rounds today, is very funny and brilliantly executed: what if Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging?

(Finally, one housekeeping note: here’s a smart way to get video from your iPod on TV using a cable you probably already have, instead of the $19/£15 proprietary Apple iPod AV Cable.)

( Technorati tags: ipod | google-video | moon)

Like Shozu, new S60 app Merkitys (Finnish for ‘Meaning’) allows easy upload of images from your phone to Flickr (or your own server). Merkitys however also automatically adds ‘context’, which includes location (i.e. GSM location information: Mobile Country Code, Mobile Network Code, Location Area Code and Cell ID, but also GPS data if you also have a supported receiver) as well as the usual user-defined description and tags etc., and - curiously - the addresses of all bluetooth devices in the vicinity. Although this is only the first beta release, it worked flawlessly for me. The source is also available.

(via the mobile experience)

( Technorati tags: s60 | merkitys | flickr)

PolarView have released a .kmz file for Google Earth providing more Antarctic data, including the location of drift buoys, larger identified icebergs, selected research vessels and research stations, as well as some higher resolution imagery. Naturally I was drawn to Troll, the Norwegian base on Queen Maud Land (named by a popular vote of Norwegian schoolchildren).

Who knows whether I’ll ever make it to Antarctica for real, but in the meantime my name at least will be heading SOUTH with the Ben Saunders’ sledge. I’ve just purchased mile 897 of Ben and team-mate Tony Haile’s 1800-mile trip to the pole and back.

( Technorati tags: antartica | google-earth | south)

In a first step towards allowing users to maintain “personal mobile websites”, Nokia research has announced it has ported Apache httpd and mod_python to the S60/Symbian platform. (The code is so far only free for use within Nokia.)

My head is still reeling from the implications of this last paragraph, which seems completely farfetched and yet perfectly obvious at the same time:

We believe that being able to run a globally accessible personal website on your mobile phone has the potential of changing the Internet landscape. If every mobile phone or even every smartphone initially, is equipped with a webserver then very quickly most websites will reside on mobile phones. That is bound to have some impact not only on how mobile phones are perceived but also on how the web evolves.

(via eriksmartt.com)

( Technorati tags: s60 | apache | python)

Jon Udell’spost (via Lifehacker) on Alex Bosworth’s hack to save semi-private delicious bookmarks using the for:yourname tag prompted me to fix an aspect of my use of delicious that has been bugging me recently.

For a while now, I’ve been using a variation on Frasier Speirs’ AppleScript to post to delicious directly from QuickSilver, tagging these GTD-style with @review, for those times when I want bookmark something quickly without going to the trouble of describing, annotating and tagging the link.

More often than not, this means that I end up with a whole list of raw urls I haven’t bothered to organise: not something I really want to share and not much use to me or other delicious users. The perfect place for these to appear would be in your delicious inbox (except that in delicious parlance, your inbox is a place for users/tags you’re subscribed to), but having them show up in your private for: bucket is a good substitute.

Trouble is, as Jon says: “I’d also like to be able to delete things in my for: bucket. That wouldn’t mean deleting the sender’s bookmarklets, but rather rejecting for: tags aimed at me.” If you use Alex’s generated bookmarklet you have no control over the source of your incoming for: tagged links. One solution to this is to create your own ‘feeder’ account (with username yourname.private for example) from which you can target links to your main account’s for: bucket and then delete them when you’re done.

So now, my QuickSilver action posts to my ‘feeder’ account, tagging links with for:robbevan, my ‘real’ account.

I still have a huge number of @review posts to deal with though…

(Technorati tags: delicious | applescript | quicksilver)

Years ago, Tim and I invented a company called SHEIP, one of XPT’s clients, who were developing animal networking technology that would enable sheep, for example, each to have individual IP addresses and to be herded remotely. It’s good to see that this kind of technology really is in development, even if it’s not quite ready for prime (beef) time: “A farmer would control multiple herds from a single server at home as if they were playing a video game, said Zack Butler, of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.” (From New Scientist, June 7, 2004, via Engadget and Roland Piquepaille).

I spent about two hours today trying to fix my PowerShot S10 so I can take a picture of my phone (don’t ask). I just kept getting the same E28 error in the viewfinder and then the lens would retract. So I reformatted the CF card and upgraded the firmware (a bit of a hair-raising experience: one false move and the camera’s toast) - still nothing. Finally, I found this thread. The upshot is, no one but Canon knows what the error is and you have to pay them £150 to tell you. Or you can bang it hard… so I did. Now fixed!