Swing Your Hips

Moving On

Much as I love blogger, I have to keep up with the Joneses and prove what a serious netizen I am by setting up my own, so I'm moving Swing Your Hips to a new location. It's also so I can find out more about how some of the advanced blogging stuff works.

I've also set up a Phil-style wiki for longer pieces.

Incidentally anyone else who's called Crossan can have a blog or site here if they want just mail me steve dot crossan atsign gmail dot com.

Idea for an alternative way to do automatic translation: use an existing body of human-translated texts and search for matching bits of text to translate. This could be phrase or sentence-length. Also look for close matches and substitute dictionary translations of unmatched words. Of course context would mess this up badly but it might be more readable than current efforts. Someone probably doing it like this (but much smarter) already.

A few things to park here 'til I get time to write some more about them:

* I went to the re:mix culture symposium at the university of sussex last friday. It was very interesting. One of the interesting people was Tom Chance who's already written it up here. I came away quite sceptical about the Creative Commons and hopefully will get some chance to write about that soon.

* My friend Polly (artist, writer, political, cool) has a new blog.

* Fanfunded.tv is an idea I want to write about. You want to see a new series of Blake's 7 commisionned, or a new Lynn Ramsey film. Instead of waiting for someone to commission it you go to fanfunded.tv and buy the DVD in advance (or perhaps just an option to buy). Your money goes into escrow and earns interest. If enough is raised to greenlight the project, you get a share in the production and the DVD when finished. If not, after a certain time you get your money back plus the interest.

* I'd like to set up a wiki with a time-logger to get people to contribute to business plans.

3d scene reconstruction, video analysis, creating 3d models from 2d images, extrusion, analysis-synthesis:

http://www.mip.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~rk/publications/3DTV_Darmstadt.html

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kyros/research/3D.html

http://www.synapix.com

VOIP softphones are phones implemented in software that use either the built in sound card and microphone of the PC or a USB-phone.

There are loads of these, lots of them free, so I guess they can't be that difficult to write.

Some are Java and ActiveX - so I guess these could be buried in your website.

What about a pure DHTML Softphone - with the voice to phone actually happenning on the server. Streaming audio downstream to a web page is easy enough - is there a way to talk to a web page though?

There is a project called mozphone based on SIP and XUL.

I like this:

http://www.pubsub.com/

Apart from anything else, it allows you to keep track of who's linking to you or mentioning you on the web (e.g. who's mentioning runtime collective).

So it seems Longhorn is an attempt to rebuild Windows around Webservices, and at the same time to turn the web into an extension of M$:


http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=174156&seqNum=6

The Windows API exposed as web services. The alternative may be XUL:


http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/whyxul.html

The UK government, LAWS etc. (especially the standard content) is a good start for creating some standard data based on standards:

http://www.laws-project.org.uk

What does this mean? Everything has to be XHTML. Everything has to be CSS. We have to get rid of the proprietary bits in APLAWS Plus XML.