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In a recent interview with CVG, Elite creator David Braben speaks of how he believes Sony got their decisions about the PS3 absolutely right.

There’s been plenty of bashing of Sony’s handling of the PS3 launch and little to be said from anyone in defence.

Braben though thinks differently:

“I’m very wary …at the moment there’s a fashion to knock Sony and I think it’s a big mistake. The fact that they have succeeded very well twice, they’re one of the few companies to have gone outside core gamers. Don’t write them off.”

Braben continues to express his belief that the choice to go with a completely open net access service, as opposed to a closed service such as Micosoft’s XBox Live, will be key to the PS3’s success.

“That shows a very different approach. It’s not a narrow gateway, highly controlled by one person. I think that is very very positive.”

He also believes that the PS3 should be considered more than a console.

“When you put it together with the fact that it supports a keyboard and things like that, people may start to regard it more as a cheap PC than an expensive console. Or a new thing that’s somewhere in between.”

Well it remains to be seen, but I respect the positive attitude. I’m going to a talk by Braben on Monday, I wonder if this will arise in the after lecture questions.

(updated below)

In the aftermath of changing to my new Cherry MX switched keyboard I have found myself missing the handy media buttons on the old membrane keyboard.

So I had a little google about (using google) and found the Griffin Technology AirClick USB. A handy little Human Interface Device, it has five buttons and a number of plugins that allow you to control various applications. Primarily I was interested in Winamp control, playing, pausing and changing tracks. I had a deeper look into it and one of the available plugins in Sean Wilson’s new version 2 software is a winamp plugin. Cool, so I bought one.

Works great. Until I went to change volume that is, it’s just too slow for my purposes.

In the release notes there is the following addition to the latest version mentioned:

Easier creation of additional Plugins using any .Net supporting language

Well fantastic, I can do that, perhaps I can write my own winamp plugin. Plenty of searching around their site later and there’s no help or info on doing any such thing. I emailed support and got back a plugin that used sendkeys to just send configurable keys to Windows. Not a lot of use if you happen to be typing at the time!

I found the developer of the Mac software and his blog. He’s posted ways to hack the Mac version, no go for PC though.

I then noticed that the .acp plugin files in AirClick’s plugin folder were just renamed .net 2.0 IL dlls so I emailed support again asking if there was any supporting source code for writing your own plugins.

While I was waiting for a response I had a quick fiddle with Lutz Roeder’s Reflector and Denis Bauer’s FileDisassembler plugin and generated a C# project from the winamp.acp plugin. It compiled with no trouble, so I renamed the .dll to .acp, dropped it in the pugins folder, restarted AirClick and everything worked. Fantastic. Now I can get on with hacking it.

A little bit of coding later and I’ve now got a volume control that smoothly accelerates from small changes to larger the longer you hold down a button.

Then the reply came back from support:

Unfortunately we do not have source code for the AirClick. This is info that doesn’t leave the doors of research and development.

Oh dear, really, well I’m screwed then.

*GRINS*

So top marks to Mr.Wilson and his code, but the usual non-technical nounce of the average support department proves to be a barrier yet again. Great product on the other hand.

Updated Information

I decided it was worth trying to contact Griffin again, so I penned a very similar email to the last one. This time I got a direct response from Sean Wilson, the creator of the PC AirClick software.

I have not written a formal SDK or Visual Studio template for writing

AirClick plugins yet, but I do have a txt file I wrote up real quick

to send to people who are interested in writing their own. I will

attach it with this email.  - Sean Wilson

Great stuff! So here’s a copy of that file for all you plugin makers.

Making Plugins

Well I’ve got meself a decent mechanically switched keyboard, and frankly I really don’t know why I didn’t do it before. I’ve concluded that my recent problems with USB keyboards are just that they both had lower than average quality membranes. My new mechanical switch enabled Cherry MX 3000 is working wonders for my typing speed. I had found that I had to slow down too much with the old keyboard, now I’m back up to previous speeds, perhaps even a little faster.

IE 7 is now out and available for download.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx

Google have combined Google Spreadsheets and Writely into Google Docs.

http://docs.google.com/

Logging in I discover that both my Google Spreadsheets and Writely documents are all there available to me, nice.

According to the IE Team Blog, IE will be released soon after a final Expert Zone chat this thursday (12th October 2006).

It’ll be released via automatic updates.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/10/09/Last-Expert-Zone-Chat-Before-We-Ship-IE.aspx

Well it finally happened, Google aquired YouTube, for the grand sum of $1.65 billion. Jesus, that’s a lot of money.

Apparently Yahoo were also in on the bid but lost out to Google.

More info on TechCrunch.

TechChrunch report that there’s a possibility that Google are out to purchase YouTube.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/06/completely-unsubstantiated-googleyoutube-rumor/

Entirely unsabstantiated of course.

Yesterday google launched the Google Blog Search Pinging Service. A simple way to be included in Googles blog index and search.

Read more here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/got-blog-will-ping.html

Powerset (http://www.powerset.com) looks interesting. At present the company is in “semi-stealth” mode. Gathering investment as well as developing their natural language search engine.

Powerset’s Barney Pell has someinteresting stuff to say on the topic.

http://www.barneypell.com/archives/2006/10/powerset_and_na.html

Well worth a read, some interesting concepts with respect to the way that search engines work nowadays.

Search engines are keyword based and at their heart are really just boolean based searches against their index. They take your search term and stripout out what are known as stopwords leaving just the keywords. Stopwords are words such as a, about, from, of, for and the like, these would only complicate the results of a boolean search as they are such common words.

Pell and gang demonstrate that in some searches these words are acutally useful. For example, take these three search terms:

• Books for children
• Books about children
• Books by children

When for, about and by are all stripped out we are only left with Books children, and the search engine cannot distiguish between the three quite different purposes of the queries.

Pell says that we are all searching with an impovourished, pidgin english at present, I for one would welcome a more natural approach at times. I’m sure like me, many of you have sometimes come across a particular search that never seems to get the results that you’re after, or at the most it takes a long time to get the right string of keywords and advanced search options. Imagine what searching is like for the less techinacally minded out there who don’t speak keywordese. NL searching, if it works and is marketted well to that larger group of people, could be very successful.

If though, when it launches, it doesn’t have a toolbar-esque plugin then I will find it very difficult to remember to use it. When I want something my mouse cursor always goes straight for my Google toolbar.

Oranges version of the HTC Breeze/MTeoR is up on their swiss website, complete with a link to the getting started PDF.

Shame that video calling has been disabled, even the camera has been removed from the front.

It is just me or are USB keyboards slow? Everyone that I have ever used has a little bit of trouble keeping up with my typing sometimes. Is this something that anyone else has experienced?

Perhaps it’s just poor membranes and the completely unpositive feel. That’s it I’m going to finally bite the bulllet and get a nice Cherry M8 mechanically switched keyboard.

There you go, ordered. Matter of fact my boss was kind enough to pay for it.

Cheers Brian!

I’ve just downloaded Windows Live Writer (WLW), Microsoft’s desktop/offline Blog composer/writer software.

Set up was very easy, I simply game the address and login details of my blog. Not only did WLW determine what my blog was running on, but it also has downloaded and used my CSS.

Editing in the WLW is therefore truly WYSYWIG as I am typing I am seeing everything styled by the CSS from my site. I’ll do a screen shot.

There you go, all I did was ALT-PrintScreen and paste. Looks like it’s inserted a thumbnail with a link. Ah yes it has, there are plenty of handy properties to choose where it links to and how big it is etc.

I’m quite enjoying this, let’s try and publish now.

– edit –

Well that published fine, I forgot categories as always though. I can also do those here, it’s picked them up. Can’t add any new ones though. Still I think I may find this a useful place to store the longer type of heavy thinking articles.

Ahah! I have just discovered you can also open and edit from a list of existing posts. I was wondering how you did that. Overall this is quite a handy utility.

http://ideas.live.com

Having recently acquired some unix hosting I’ve been experimenting with various PHP/MySQL based applications. Wordpress for example that this blog runs under, as well as Joomla for CMS and phpBB for forums.

Having been a long time user of ASP applications some of my experiences have been quite refreshing, especially with respect to ease of installation on shared space in some cases.

Now just the other day I decided I needed a Wiki for a new project. I’ve been using the ASP.net driven FlexWiki for some time now and have been very happy with it’s ease of install and the small changes I usually want to make to look and feel. When it came to choosing a unix based option I immediately plumped for MediaWiki, it seemed an obvious choice being that it runs the most famous Wiki out there, WikiPedia.

Oh how wrong could I have been though. When it came to skinning it to get a look that suited my purpose, it became a complete nightmare. The skinning system is a complete disaster area and it requires more work than I have time for to get your head around it. Yes it can be done, as witnessed by the Mono-project website or the Mozilla Dev site, but it’s a complete bitch. The mixture and muddle of markup and PHP code is just simply unprofessional.

So I had a look around and after a while searching I came up with a beautifully easily skinnable Wiki software. PMWiki has a great philosophy behind it’s code base and a simple skinning system that is a joy to behold after wading through the nightmare depths of MediaWiki.

I shall enjoy designing a nice template later tonight.

http://www.pmwiki.org

Sigma’s new D-SLR the Foveon X3 powered SD14 is looking very nice. The teaser site has some very luscious photography on it, mostly portraiture, that has the look of well scanned transparencies rather than digital pics.

I must admit I find the whole Foveon sensor concept very appealing, yet I’m never likely to go the Sigma route now that I have a collection of EF mount lenses. Now if Sigma were able to build bodies with different mounts as they do with their excellent range of lenses then I expect you’d see many many more people thinking about upgrading to a Sigma body. Especially if the sample images from the SD14 are anything to go by.

Also announced at the same time though is the new Sigma DP1 compact digital camera. This a similar Foveon X3 sensor as the SD14 with the same 14 mega pixels. So if you’re looking for a compact and want to try out the whole Foveon lark then this seems the perfect route for those of us that can’t see ourselves switching to a different mount for our SLRs.

It has a prime lens equivalent to a 28mm. Looking t the pics it also has a large LCD screen, and manual controls. Looks promising.

Here’s one for anyone who feels like they are the opposition.

I designed a t-shirt today for my fabulous wife. Unfortunately spreadshirt don’t make a shirt she considers long enough. Here it is anyway. Available in three colours.

If you’ve ever wanted to add convincing hair or fur to a photograph then look no further than this quick tutorial.

http://www.digitalmediadesigner.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=19756-3

Just saw this old vid on YouTube, funniest thing I have seen in a long time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5OHPgne1S4

The BBC are currently broadcasting a four part radio programme about peak oil. Presented by Tom Mangold and titled Driven by Oil it is broadcast on Radio 4 on mondays.

On the BBC website you can listen to past shows.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/drivenbyoil/