… from “Exegene”:http://www.exegene.com. I saw Macc play at the last “Techicality All-Nighter”:http://www.inperspectiverecords.com. He plays the drums, live drum and bass. The set was incredible!

bq. !http://thinkingmachine.blogsome.com/images/macc.jpg!

I woud suggest you check it out: “XGN013 Macc”:http://www.exegene.com/releases.

bq. !http://thinkingmachine.blogsome.com/images/Picture1.png!

“XGN017: Dissident”:http://www.exegene.com/releases

bq. “Exegene”:http://www.exegene.com/ is an independent netlabel set up in 2004 to promote the works of unsigned drum’n'bass and jungle artists worldwide. We are a non-commercial organisation, releasing singles, EPs and LPs by our artists in MP3 format, which can be listened to absolutely free. No subscription, no login, no nothing. Exegene brings you only the very finest unsigned DnB talent, and if we don’t you can tell our mums.

Check it out…

This from “infosthetics.com”:http://infosthetics.com

bq. problem 7: aesthetics. the purpose of information visualization is the insights into data that it provides, not just pretty pictures. but what makes a picture pretty? what can we learn from making a pretty picture & enhancing the representation of insights? it’s important, therefore, to understand how insights & aesthetics interact, & these two goals could sustain insightful & visually appealing information visualization.

“continue reading”:http://infosthetics.com/archives/2005/08/information_vis_2.html for a short description of the other 9 ‘unsolved information visualization problems’.

I’ve been following John Battelle’s “Searchblog”:http://battellemedia.com/ for a while now and now there’s a book too which looks really good. Check this:

In the near future, search will metastasize from its origins on the PC-centric Web and be let loose on all manner of devices. This has already begun with mobile phones and PDAs; expect it to continue, viruslike, until search is built into every digital device touching our lives. The telephone, the automobile, the television, the stereo, the lowliest object with a chip and the ability to connect—all will incorporate network-aware search.

This is no fantasy; this is simple logic. As more and more of our lives become connected, digitized, and computed, we will need navigation and context interfaces to cope. What is TiVo, after all, but a search interface for television? ITunes? Search for music. That box of photographs under your bed and the pile of CDs teetering next to your stereo? Analog artifacts, awaiting their digital rebirth. How might you find that photo of you and your lover on the beach in Greece from fifteen years ago? Either you scan it in, or you lose it to the moldering embrace of analog obscurity. But your children will have no such problems; their photographs are already entirely digital and searchable—complete with metadata tagged right in (date, time, and soon, context).

Found this sitting in my drafts waiting to be published.

bq. I’ve happened across a number of interesting films about emerging digital culture. “Project Free Zarathustra”:http://freezarathustra.blogspot.com film, “Alternative Freedom”:http://www.ourmedia.org/node/16702, which, featuring the likes of Lawrence Lessig, Richard Stallman and doseone, sets out to shed light on the the invisible war on culture. Not sure when the film is going to be avialble but the trailer sure does wet the appetitie.

“Gamer Br”:http://www.pirex.com.br/gamer/index_eng.asp is also definately worth checking out:

bq. Gamer Br is a Brazilian documentary about the game scene around here. It gives voice to gamers, producers, lanhouse owners, journalists, psychologists, anthropologists, politicians, government representatives and game enthusiasts about questions as professional gaming, market, ‘addiction’, piracy, policies of incentive, censorship and the so discussed ‘violence’ in games.

So I finally managed to track down a copy of “Mapping Hacks”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596007035/002-5015477-8791243?v=glance!

!http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0596007035.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg!

I’ve only just flipped though it and read about half the introduction and preface. It’s already made one very sobering observation.

Location aware technology promises to provide content to us where ever we are. This of course means that our location is always known. We’ll never be lost again. That might sound like a good thing but sometimes we do want to be lost. What happens to serendipity when we always know what, and even who, is around the corner?

Technology can also bring us closer to terror than we’ve ever been, or needed to be, before. Someone “sent a text”:http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2005/08/15/chilling_sms_se.html from the “plane that went down”:http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=6007826&cKey=1124034616000 in Greece this weekend:

“The pilot has turned blue,” a passenger said in a mobile text message to his cousin, according to Greek television. “Cousin farewell, we’re freezing.”

Technology holds so much promise but we tend to forget about the darkside of that promise….

Edit: Just spotted this on “Slashdot”:http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/14/2228204&tid=209:

“On ebay people are paying real money to buy “WoW”:http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/ gold… while some guy in Korea murdered another guy over a rare sword that existed only in an MMORPG. “This essay”:http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/wowworld.html looks at the way more and more people are failing to draw a distinction between their real and online lives and takes it to its logical, yet utterly insane, conclusion.”

Ok, so this post has nothing to do with any gathering of any developers, it’s just the name of a song by “Teebee”:http://www.beatservice.no/teebee_k.html and I’m listening to a really good drum and bass “radio show”:http://www.subvertcentral.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22223 right now.

I am trying to get some development on the go though but I’ve run into issues installing the “python IDE”:http://homepages.cwi.nl/~jack/macpython/ on my machine. There seems to be some sort of bug with the installer and I dont know my way around OS X well enough to sort it out, so it’s all really frustrating.

I saw a really good OS X book at Borders the other day but it was for Panther so I left it on the shelf. I also didn’t make a note of the name, which I’m regretting now. All the books I’ve come across so far are aimed at your beginners and I’m looking for something that delves into the technical side. I’ll have to go back and see if I can find it again. (Suggestions and recomendations are welcome too.)

So while I plug away at OS X I’ve also been thinking about what will be the best approach to some of the ideas I mentioned earlier. I dont have any sort of development background or experience at all so this means I have to start from scratch. So I’ve settled on “Python”:www.python.org as my programming language. I’ve been using it for a few months now and it’s really easy to learn and really powerful so I’m happy with that choice.

Next choice will be which web application framework to go for. So far there’s “AJAX”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX but that looks way to demanding for someone just starting out. Then there’s “Ruby on Rails”:www.rubyonrails.org. That would mean learning a new language but RoR has built to speed up and simplify the development of web application, which is exactly what I’m after. Ideally, I’d like to find a Python based framework and there are a number to choose from. The “pyWebOff”:http://pyre.third-bit.com/pyweb/index.html looks like the best place to start there.

So we’ll see how the search goes. Right now I’ve got to get past getting python running on my machine…

Two weeks ago I was telling my room mate about my plans to start my own country. (I have most of the government policy all figured out, I now need to figure out it’s economic policy.) The idea was inspired partyl by a “Wired article”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.03/kingdoms.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set I happened across sometime ago:

bq. Micronations, also known as counternations and ephemeral states, consist of one or more people united by the desire to form and/or inhabit an independent country of their own making. All micronations have governments, laws, and customs; the main distinguishing factor is whether their citizens want to establish a physical home country and seek international recognition, or whether, as is the case with Talossa, they’re happy just to pretend.

Most of the inspiration came from “Adam Greenfield’s”:www.v-2.org “Minifesto for Virtual States”:http://www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=339. The idea has sat with me ever since and it’s an idea that I’ll one day form the cornerstone of my own “micronation”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronation.

So anyway, I was telling my room mate about this idea and not even half an hour later I saw an ad for a BBC 2 documentary called “How To Start Your Own Country”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/listings/programme.shtml?day=today&service_id=4224&filename=20050803/20050803_2200_4224_3473_30:

bq. Ever thought about having your face printed on a stamp, a coin or a banknote? Ever dreamt of owning a diplomatic passport, paying no tax, or legalising drugs? Frustrated by the levels of crime, the decline in education and the quality of the health service? How would you like the chance to change all these things and take control of your own destiny? Well fear not. Help is at hand.

Help was at hand! I have to admit, I did feel a bit cheated. This was my own brilliant idea after all. At least that’s what I thought. In my excitement though, I missed the screening times so I didn’t know when it was on. I saw a review of the show, which aired last night, in this morning’s Metro. I’d missed it! *sigh*

So, the ideas I’ve been working on revolve around the idea of location. Location and our connection to the locations and spaces around us. Location aware technologies are blossoming! and we are only just starting to scratch the surface of what is possible. The possibilites are endless and instead of just letting the technology run it’s course we have the abillity to steer the direction that it takes it and thats exactly what people are doing.

The “Where 2.0″:http://conferences.oreillynet.com/where conference was an incredible step in the right direction:

Location-aware technologies combined with mapping and other data are poised to create a whole new class of web apps and services. Maps are becoming an interface, helping us to visualize and access a variety of data. Location is fertile ground for hackers and researchers who mash up Google Maps with Craigslist or plug restaurant info into dashboard navigation. Call centers, insurance agencies, transportation companies, and retailers are finding unconventional internal uses for location technologies too.

But where is location-based technology leading us in the larger sense? And where’s the business model beef? The first Where 2.0 Conference brings together the people, projects, and issues leading the charge into this technological frontier. Join us to debate and discuss what’s viable now, and what’s lurking just below the radar.

“PlaceSite”:http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~savage/ps/ was one of the applications demo’d at Where 2.0.

PlaceSite introduces a new way of using wireless networks — to create digital community services by, for and about people who are together in the same physical place. PlaceSite is an open platform for a new breed of Web service tied intimately to physical places.

Sounds like a really cool project! It’s open source too so I’m going to see about getting involved somehow. This is a mild diversion from what I had in mind though. I think the key to location aware technology is first establishing our individual connections to space. This is going to help us come to term with the subtleties and complications that we are bound to encounter. Once we have that figured out and once we have a better understanding of what kind of information becomes relevant to us on the move, sharing information is going to be so much easier.

And we have a wealth of information to work with. This from the book “Inescapable Data”:http://www.inescapabledata.com

As communications, computing, and data storage converge, data is becoming utterly ubiquitous… and that changes everything. In their new book, authors John Webster and Chris Stakutis reveal how data transforms the way you do business, the technologies you use, the investments you make, the life you live, and the world you live in.

So lets see where this takes us!

!http://thinkingmachine.blogsome.com/images/campfire.jpg(boards of canada)!

I cant wait for this one!