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Sometimes we forget that the laws we obey are written (indirectly) by us.
If you want to sort something out, you can join a lobbying group (fat lot of good that did me) but more satisfying in the short term is contacting your MP. I was trying to figure out the best way to write to Glenda Jackson when I came across this lovely little application that directs emails to your MP. Now I have no excuse to ignore my constitutional responsibilities
Blog This!You can easily blog interesting web content with Flock, in just a few clicks.Example: 1. Highlight a passage on a web page that you would like to blog about. 2. Right-click that selection and choose Blog This. 3. The blog editor opens with that selection already inserted. Not only that, the selection is properly formatted as a Blockquote and appropriate citation is included.
A family friend, Lauren Ingram has set up a fund to help with the relief work. She's focusing on collecting smaller amounts of money and quickly distributing it to the right people on the ground using an extensive network of trusted local contacts.
She is keeping a blog her progress.
If you'd like to send cash in the knowledge it will go straight to the front line, here are Jim Ingram's (Lauren's dad) instructions:
If you would like to contribute to Lauren and Tamur's 'fund', please make a check out to Dr. Tamur Mueenuddin, mail it to me at James E. Ingram 3036 Cambridge Place, NW, Washington, DC 20007 and I will deposit it to a separate account set up at CitiBank here in the US.
And there's a Doom port as well :-)
So I've been sitting here getting increasingly pissed-off about the totally unregulated goings on at Google, the iTunes Music Store, CD manufacturing, spyware galore and a whole host of other nasty little profit-driven abuses of power so in the end I snapped.
I've joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Mind you, I haven't received my t-shirt yet, but this is a cause worth forgoing the shirt:-)
It's 11 o'clock.
Sony has stopped production of the 'root-kit' protected CDs. Thanks for nothing but nice to see a company realise that things are a little more complicated than simply dropping some copy protection on a disk.
Sitting here on a Sunday when I should be playing with Nicki and Clemmie trying to wrangle the information architecture of a corporate brand site into some sort of sensible, digestible expression and listening to Belle and Sebastien's If You're Feeling Sinister (label) and had forgotten how incessantly bleak and beautiful it is:-)
Can I just add that I'm not a big playlist composer and tend to enjoy albums as a structured whole. This makes using Coverflow all the more enjoyable. Currently running the technology preview and so far so good.
Listening to Radio4. A woman has just launched a book on the Farsi bloggosphere
(Guardian article)
Just moderated a talk over at the Lecture List. The event is called Tsunami +200 days and looks worth a look.
Shivrenda Sharma, Director of PlaNet Finance India will highlight the role of microfinance in long-term community building in the Tsunami affected areas in South Asia.
PlaNet Finance an NGO based in France with offices in the UK, will be holding an event on the Monday the 28th November from 5.30pm-8pm at the Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer Law Firm, 65 Fleet Street. London.
OK, so I joined the EFF. Not only am I supporting the only serious lobby group for digital rights, I also got a fabulous t-shirt;-)
There's an interesting conversation going on between David Xue, the founder of PixPulse and Roland Tanglao about the pros and cons of using email as a method to share mobile content.
I have to agree with Roland that email sucks for the job. I used email to upload to Flickr for ages until ShoZu came along. Shozu uses replication technology that creates a sort of background persistent connection it removes the requirement to have reception which of course is required for email to work.
David wrote in this morning. He is concerned that the debate is missing his central premise. Here's his note:
Hey Dug -
Saw your blog post. I just wanted to introduce myself and also give a response. I think quite a few people are missing the point here. PixPulse is not a photo storing site, I don't want people to upload their 100 photos from their last Disneyland trip, I do want people to share daily life experiences on PixPulse and publish their media with friends and the public.
My real point here is that very few phones use the Symbian OS. You can't build a business model on a OS that is only supported by less than 5% of the world's handset population. Building a J2ME app on every mobile phone and doing carrier testing is not feasible. SMS and MMS via email is easy and practially supported by all carriers.
I like Shozu, but Shozu is not PixPulse. Looks like both you and Roland have talked me into building an API for Shozu ;) Would enjoy feed back from you.
--
Cheers,David Xue
Founder/CEO, PixPulseemail: pixpulse@gmail.com
mobile: +1 206. 854. 8888Get your own PixPulse Channel:
www.pixpulse.com
He makes a good point about the ubiquity of email across networks and the difficulty of creating a tested, reliable user base of J2ME clients across many handsets. I like his offer of an API (always interesting). In the case of ShoZu, I think the functionality and user experience are so good that serious Flickreens may well be tempted to upgrade to a Symbian handset fro this service alone.
Time will tell:-)
It sort of amazes me that with all the fanfare around Clementine's birth (readers may rememember the blow-by-blow of her mother's labour)--and the fact that this blog was initially set up to track the goings on in my head about becoming a dad--that I haven't felt it necessary to mention Nick and I are going to have a son.
That's one baby boy due 2 Feb 2006 if all goes well.
Between now and then, we need to move house and get Clemmie into a school for next year (So no pressure then)...
So I participated in a Katrina relief charity initiative a few months ago and had largely forgotten about it when what should pop through the letterbox but an enveloppe from Verve stuffed full of lovely jazz cds.
Am currently listening to new grass a recording made in New York in 1968 and it's mad and insane:-)
I missed this last week: EFF: An Open Letter to Sony-BMG
Been reading about the Orange home screen on Symbian phones.
"It looks like they are producing several versions of it, with differing numbers of icons and features with different graphics for different 'peoples'. They seem to want to configure your phone to give you everything you could want on the home screen, being you a housewife with just three icons or a business person with 8 or so. This is speculation and has been inferred from several things I've seen today but the Orange signature devices with the home screen (Series 60, SPV etc) seem to be what its all about."
I have to say, the more I use my N70, the more the "Home Screen" really pisses me off. Most anoying of all is the fact I can't disable it. It's in the bloody firmware. Now, if I could only pluck up the courage to spend two hours on the phone with Orange to find someone who could at least show me how to customise the thing...
From an IA point of view, I can see where they're coming from. This is the often-times fantasy of a "shelf" navigation, a place where all things can be pointed to. This type of nav really works if you can find a common thread running between the items on the shelf. In the case of the N70, that means that a Snake Game, a tool to manage your memory card, some help documentation a Microsoft Word reading tool are all lumped together with no consideration of use case.
The Journal of Usability Studies (JUS) is a peer-reviewed, international, online publication dedicated to promoting and enhancing the practice, research, and education of usability engineering.
A warm welcome to issue one volume one of the Online International Journal of Usability Studies
I can't vouch for her music as I haven't listened to it, but Jade Leary has just released an album over on the LetterXshop which is unusual in that it respects the rights and fair-use needs of its buyers by avoiding any DRM.
The album includes a number of downloadable extras like hi-res album art. I hope Jade does well as she's embracing a new kind of marketplace where vendors listen to "digital-lifestyle" consumers and give them what they want without trying to control or constrain them.
Well, today is the last day of Book Week at Clementine's school. The kids were asked to go in fancy dress--picking the costume of their favourite character--and little Clem has gone as The Little Red Riding Hood:-)
I'm routinely amazed at how eBay manages to be one of the internet's most successful services with one of the worst interfaces in the business sitting on top of some of the nastiest presentation-layer code I've had the misfortune to view source on...
Check out this prompt. I arrived at this page after sending a response to a fellow ebay user who was querying the high postage on an item I'm selling. At the top of the screen a reasuring message tells me that all has gone as expected, that is that my message to the other user was successfully delivered.
Now look down about 50 pixels and just to the right is a huge yellow call-to-action button telling me to "Respond to this question".
So did I send the damn message or what?
Yet another worthy initiative is under way by our friends at the w3c. This time they're looking at the inaccessibility of captcha, those funny images of twisted letters one is often asked to enter when signing up for web services.
Captchas are what is known as a Turing test, used in this instance to prevent automated systems creating accounts and abusing the system. My guess is they work quite well for their original purpose. The problem is that if you're blind, can't see that well or have another cognitive problem like dislexia, you can't prove that you're not a computer.
The initiative will be looking at accessible ways for humans to prove their dna.
This page contains all entries posted to A Donkey on the Edge in November 2005. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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