GeoTagging Flickr and Aperture

I love the geotagging feature in flickr, but I haven't really gotten round to using it yet. The flickr export plugin for aperture looks likely to change that. It allows you to export directly to flickr from Aperture and will grab the current coordinates you have open in google earth at the click of a button. REad more at the excellent Inside Aperture blog

Perfect copies in a virtual world

The economy of Second Life, the virtual world created by Linden Labs and inhabited by hundreds of thousands of real people, is in turmoil. The economy of Second Life is based around people designing, making and selling virtual objects such as clothes, cars and assorted widgets. Each day something around $500,000 to a $1,000,000 US dollars changes hands in Second Life. Very recently someone developed a script that allows the user to point at any object in the game and create a perfect copy. Ed Felten, ffom Freedom to Tinker makes this analogy,

To understand the possible impact of CopyBot, imagine such a thing existed in real life. Point this CopyGadget at any real-world object, push a button, and you get a perfect copy of that object. Want a new Lambourghini sportscar? Just find one in a parking lot and copy it. Like the lime sorbet at the local ice cream parlor? Buy a cup, take it home, and fill your freezer with copies. When you get down to the last cup in the freezer, just copy it again. You get the idea.

What interests me about this is whether the virtual world will develop new and unique business models to deal with this issue and develop a thriving economy, when there is no cost to distribution and anyone can have anything that has already been made. I could actually see designers benefitting from this, creating highly personal objects on a commission basis, rather than broadly popular objects. The more specifically tailored to the individual the greater value it will have to them and less meaning for others. It might also be possible to build reputation into the world more explicitly. For example, you might use the copybot script to duplicate a Lambourghini but if you then like the object and choose to reward the creator financially you gain some form of kudos/karma/respect that indicates the kind of approach you have to intellectual property. Those that have lower or non-existent karma might find themselves pushed to the edge of society, where no one would want to interact with them. Perhaps this offers us an interesting insight into the future of digital distribution. Via Freedom to Tinker and Reuters who have a news desk in Second Life

Hot Chip at the Doug Fir

I caught Hot Chip playing at the doug Fir Lounge here in Portland last night. There is a certain irony in seeing a British band playing in the US, but there are some major benefits as well. I managed to get tickets on the night with no queuing, tickets were only $13. There was enough space to actually find a seat during the support acts and enough people to jump around with when Hot Chip came on. The band themselves played a great set, they are truly electro pop nerds, no rock glamour here, just sweat, synths and digital distortion. They overlay fantastic percussion elements and great guitar riffs over the top of dirty electro synth sounds. There was no patter from the band telling everyone how great the city was and all the rest of that learned by rote band speak, just good music. The venue was cool, enough space, hard working bartenders and some great green/yellow underfloor lighting around the bar, that give women wearing heels, a slightly surreal sexy appearance to their calves. Verdict: Highly Recommended

Cycling: Portland Vs. London

Cycling in Portland is a very easy very pleasant experience but it lacks some of the visceral elements of a good ride though London plus a few annoyances of its own. Firstly cyclists in general behave very differently here than London. Portland cyclists behave like cars, they take up lanes, and they don't filter through traffic. In fact filtering through traffic may be illegal here. Cars are petrified of riders and stay well away. Though because most cyclists ride like they are cars, if you filter or come down the inside there is a significant chance a car/truck will turn across you without looking. Stop signs, these are at every junction and apparently mandate that you do what they say, that is come to a complete stop. This makes it impossible to have a nice flowing ride and so as a rule I ignore them as far as possible. I miss the cut and thrust of riding in London, the greater urgency the fast riders and the impromptu races, though my life expectancy is probably higher here!

The blogosphere awakes

GreenPrint has so far been featured on the following blogs. Most of the coverage has been pretty positive so far. Lets hope the momentum builds and we can actually use up all of our servers bandwidth, 50Gb this month with downloads! Treehugger http://insidegreentech.com/ http://digg.com http://www.hugg.com/

Technorati Tags: greenprint

Unexpected Problems

Well after the excitement of launching GreenPrint we started to hear feedback that the application said it was expired before it had even been used once. This only happens on a completely fresh install not when an earlier build of the application has been installed previously removed and then the new one installed. Predictably all the testers had used previous versions and did not spot this problem. We are working hard on this and will have a fix out by the end of tonight. Update: Its fixed now so go grab a copy at www.printgreener.com

Technorati Tags: greenprint

Bike is go

A quick trip to the bike shop and my bike is now ready to ride. That is as soon as the torrential rain and strong winds subside. Looking forward to the head clearing ritual of riding to work in the morning.

Technorati Tags: cycling

Fortune, Cookie?

Went for Dim Sum for lunch today, and got the fortune cookie on my way out. My particular cookie had the above 3 fortunes. The first sounds great, The second is ambiguous, and the third is just plain weird.

Illustrator CS2 and rosetta crash

Quick note to make this tip easier to find. Using the pathfinder in Illustrator CS2 on a MacBook Pro, OSX 10.4.8 causes illustrator to crash instantly. There is a simple if slightly bizarre solution to this problem.

Open Illustrator, close the appearance pane, then quit Illustrator. Reopen Illustrator, an you should be able to use the pathfinder, and even reopen the appearance pane.

Head nod to the fantastic Macosxhints for the tip, Link

GreenPrint is Go!

GreenPrint Technologies the software company I have been working on as Technical Director for the last 6 months is about to launch its first product. GreenPrint eliminates those annoying waste pages that you never wanted printed in the first place. Its a bit like a spam filter for your printer. No more URL's or banner ads wasting your last piece of paper. GreenPrint makes it simple to add and remove pages from your print job, just double click the preview image, and its gone, double click again and its back in the job. Remove that title page or those couple of pages of legal disclaimer that seems to come with every email these days. You can easily keep track of the benefit GreenPrint s doing through its reporting system and see how you benefit your own pocket and the environment. There are a number of other features in the application but I will let you take a look around and see for yourself. We need your feedback, this a version 1.00 release and we will be working hard over the next few months to incorporate user feedback ad make this a truly great product. Please check it out at www.printgreener.com

Sleep, or lack thereof

I have been sleeping terribly for the last few nights averaging between 4 and 5 hours despite going to bed at midnight and waking at 8am. I am generally awake from 3 to 6 am staring at the ceiling, reading and wondering why as a usually world class sleeper, I cant manage to get a decent 7 hours plus of quality sleep. So far large amounts of caffeine are staving off fatigue but its not going to be pretty for long. I was going to post this at 4am but my battery died.

Life support

Triple shot, americano from Stumptown, the best coffee in Portland. Plus I get to check out the cool fixed gear rides of all the couriers parked outside. Which reminds me, my bike is currently sitting in the basement, unridden for two good reasons. One I need a pedal spanner to put the pedals on with and two it has yet to stop raining since I got here, 10 days ago.

Election Redemption

Seeing the democrats take back control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, was great. The impressive thing about being in America at this time, is to see just how much it mattered to so many people to show the world that they weren't blindly accepting of the idiocy and arrogance of George Bush. There were smiles on so many people faces the day after the election, the editorials in the media have generally been very positive about the change, and its interesting to see just how poorly regarded the Rove/Bush election strategy was.

Coincidence

I think this probably takes a new all time high for the power of coincidence. The story starts with BA kindly leaving my bag in London, as a consequence I had to go buy some clothes, and ultimately ended up in Diesel. I bought a couple of things and one of the girls invited me to their new collection launch party. So far nothing too unusual about that. Well attractive girls inviting me to parties, isn't that common but its not the point of this post. On the day of the launch party, I went to EB Games to check out an xBox360 for our house, to ensure it really is the complete bachelor pad. Had a chat with the guy serving as I was there, and then headed back to the office. In the evening Hayden and I went down to the store for the free drinks and to check out the hip Portland crowd. The guy that I had met 6 hours earlier serving in the store was the DJ, and recognised me, quite weird indeed. I can add one more layer of coincidence he was DJ'ing with the headphones that a really good friend of mine from London/Japan/New York designed. It was cool to see the hipper side of Portland, this is a city where a T-shirt and fleece are considered the height of style in many of the bars. Definitely a stark contrast to London, and I find myself surprisingly missing the coolness/pretentiousess/stupidity of Shoreditch and the whole East London scene.

Election Night

Exciting night here in the US, watching the Democrats take back control of the House and are on the verge of taking the Senate. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of the atrocious Bush administration.

Virtualisation

My new MacBookPro and Parallels desktop are an amazing combination. Being able to work in OS X and have another window open with Windows XP running in it, makes testing and development incredibly easy. Add a second monitor, and my productivity has soared. I have yet to install boot camp, as the performance for the applications I am testing is fine within parallels. The only thing now is for someone to figure out how to virtualize access to the graphics card.

Rain, rain, rain

Its been raining here for 3 days solid now, I think I am starting to go slightly mad. I am not leaving the house without my gore-tex again.

Luggage!

My bag arrived yesterday at 2 AM just as I was figuring out how to sleep through that particular part of the night. Better late than never.

Still no bag

Well my initial satisfaction with BA for their response to my lost bag is starting to fade. Its 48 hours later, the BA tracking system tells me nothing, their phone line tells me nothing and there is no way to speak to a human. I am off shopping this afternoon so that I at least have something clean to put on. They will probably try to deliver it whilst I am out buying clothes that by the time I get back I will no longer need.

Jet Lag

For some reason the jet-lag on this trip has been particularly rough. I have been making it through to about 11pm, but then for some reason my body believes there is something more interesting to do than sleep between 2 and 4:30 in the morning. Unfortunately my body is wrong, and staring at the ceiling and reading email is a poor alternative to a good deep sleep.