Thursday, 29 August 2002
I have been using JabRSS as my prime RSS
notification service for a while now, but lately it has been offline
often. The author told me there were some problems with the hosting of
the JabRSS bot. I was really pleased with how it worked, though, and
wanted to set it up for myself. Unfortunately I found it to have way to
much dependencies for my needs.
In comes janchor by atrus. This is
another RSS notification service written in perl. You can register arbitrary news
sources with it and later subscribe to presence of those sources. The
presence even shows DND when the source can not be reached for retrieving
updates. Works great so far and the TODO looks promising.
Tuesday, 6 August 2002
I just came across this Slashdot
posting pointing to an article on
tactile, physical interfaces and how they might the next evolutionary
step in how we interact with machines.
At the end of the article there's a link to a collection
of Phidget Projects, where Phidget is a contraction of the words
physical and widget. The
first of those projects is Buddy
Bugs. Now that immediately rang a bell. My hunch was right. It's
a physical model of a leaf with bugs on it, where each bug represents a
person on your buddy list (in this case using the MSN IM network). The
bugs are translucent and their glow shows the presence of the
person.
This is really exciting. Most of you know the Jabber World Map and maybe even the
Jabber Fish Tank. What you might
not know is that they have a common ancestor: the Jabber Christmas Tree.
It's not online right now because, well, it's August. Anyway, this is a
tree with lights, where each light represents a person. They all use some
of the same concepts as the Buddy Bugs and maybe a physical version of
the Jabber World Map or the Jabber Christmas Tree would make a good
Phidget. Wow.
Monday, 5 August 2002
I'm back from Malta. It was a really good and much needed vacation
break with lot's of sunny, warm weather and nice things to see. Those of
you who found me on the Jabber World
Map while I was on Malta know ;-).