So I had the opportunity to take part in an Augmented Reality standardisation meeting on the fringe of this year’s 3GSM Mobile World Congress. First of all, it was the year the heavens opened (someone on twitter said it was as if the show had turned into Glastonbury) and I got drenched and my shoes…
Read More i haz bin in yr AR standardz, facilitatin yr interop. kthx!I’m not quite as sceptical as some about this. However, it’s not clear to me how this differs from the sort of thing UNOSAT does all the time – here’s their analysis of imagery over Abyei, the key border area between North and South Sudan. Actually it looks like the “Enough Project” is going to…
Read More tasksSo someone’s trying to raise $150,000 to buy a satellite from the bankruptcy of TerreStar, in order to “Connect Everyone”. I admire the aim, but I’m concerned that this is going to be a round of forgetting that a lot of perfectly good GSM operators are doing just that. Also, I can’t find any reference…
Read More what could possibly go wrong?So I was moaning about the Government and the release of lists of meetings with external organisations. Well, what about some action? I’ve written a scraper that aggregates all the existing data and sticks it in a sinister database. At the moment, the Cabinet Office, DEFRA, and the Scottish Office have coughed up the files…
Read More so you want to know who’s lobbying?Progress update on fixing the Vfeed. Dubai Airport has done something awful to their Web site; where once flights were organised in table rows with class names like “data-row2”, now, exactly half the flights are like that, they’ve been split between separate arrival, departure, and cargo-only pages, they only show the latest dozen or so…
Read More oiling the steel to sharpen the blade to shave the yakIll-coordinated links. Great news in RepRapping – South Korean scientists have succeeded in getting bacteria to make polylactic acid. PLA is the RepRap project’s favourite feedstock because it’s a reasonably tractable, general purpose plastic that can be synthesised from starch. The synthesis is not exactly simple, which is why outsourcing the job to germs is…
Read More links, the light alternative to writingWired reviews a book on the media of the Middle East, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday. Well, even pirates have press spokesmen these days. It sounds like it could be interesting, but it strikes me that this piece by Tom Griffin about trolls sponsored by various Middle Eastern actors…
Read More twitbook: book of twitsSo what do we need to know about a parliamentary bill? First of all, as soon as a piece of legislation is published, it has certain meta-data. Date originated; originating department; originating MP; originating house; type – primary legislation, order in council, statutory instrument; current status (pre-legislative/Green/White Paper, first reading, committee, report, second, third, Royal…
Read More free our bills: hardcore wonk/geek outAn idea, seeing as no-one is very interested in ORGANISE and it looks like I’ll have to learn erlang to make any impact on it. Observation 1: The price of voice telephony is falling fast. Mobile operators provide some truly huge bundles of minutes, and there’s Skype and Co.Observation 2: Political campaigns of all kinds…
Read More don’t leave me hanging on the telephoneWhining about Firefox crashes. Here’s one day last week: Start 09301515 – 5 groups, 111 tabs. Pressed page down key; CRASH. Resume successful.1538 – Hang. RAM usage peaks at 66%, CPU 1 goes to 100%1541 – Running, very slowly. Resource utilisation still very high1542 – Hang1550 – Cache cleared, normal ops resumed1813 – Hang. RAM…
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