Emotion Markup Language

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The W3C just completed the first draft of the Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML 1.0).

Um, why?

Use cases for EmotionML can be grouped into three broad types:

  1. Manual annotation of material involving emotionality, such as annotation of videos, of speech recordings, of faces, of texts, etc;
  2. Automatic recognition of emotions from sensors, including physiological sensors, speech recordings, facial expressions, etc., as well as from multi-modal combinations of sensors;
  3. Generation of emotion-related system responses, which may involve reasoning about the emotional implications of events, emotional prosody in synthetic speech, facial expressions and gestures of embodied agents or robots, the choice of music and colors of lighting in a room, etc.

If you’re still not getting the why, they have a list of 39 possible use cases. I’m wondering if it could be used for interactive fiction somehow?

I love crap like this!

Mapumental

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I watched a fascinating presentation on mapping technologies and their use in the BBC yesterday. The highlight for me was an amazing video showing all the Open Street Map edits made in 2008. The Channel 4 / MySociety / Stamen project, Mapumental was also demonstrated (well, just the Mapumental YouTube video actually).

It’s a really useful tool. Here I’m showing a few Cardiff examples.

Mapumental — Cardiff

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WikiReader

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WikiReader The WikiReader is a funky Hitch-Hikers Guide style gadget that gives you Wikipedia in your pocket. I love the form, the touchscreen, the low power consumption, the low price and that it uses a MicroSD card. You can subscribe to bi-annual updates and they will post you the cards, or you can download the (4GBs of) data yourself.

I’m waiting for an e-reader gadget like this, but the size of a paperback, that allows you to put any data on the card to read. Ideally running some flavour of Linux. And none of this copy protection nonsense!

That’s all I want. Continue reading →

Twitter dragon – a mascot for Welsh tweeters

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A simple mashup of the Twitter cartoon bird identity and 'Y Ddraig Goch' that appears on the Welsh flag. It’s not finalised yet, but it’s nearly there. When I look at it again in a few day, I’ll probably spot exactly what needs to be tweaked to make it just right. Of course, feedback at this stage is often useful too. :)

I’m thinking about putting him on a grassy backdrop, to imitate the Welsh flag even more.

Link

Mark Shuttleworth has kicked up a bit of a storm by apparently saying that Linux was “hard to explain to girls”. There is an open letter post about this on the Geek Feminism Blog, followed by a hell of a lot of comments on the subject. It seems to boil down to ‘he didn’t really mean it like that‘, ‘it’s not okay to say that kind of thing, even if you didn’t mean it like that‘ and ‘has anyone seen this video or a transcript anyway?‘

Anyway, I’ve made a little graphic that Ubuntu could use for their 11.10 release if they wanted to tackle this issue. :)

(Please note this was produced with a high level of sarcasm and irony. If you are offended, please look up those words before commenting!)

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Blogging icons

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I’ve been slightly tweaking a nice WordPress theme to use for my blog, and I wanted to use some nice minimalistic icons. I had in mind the excellent Picol project icons, but on closer inspection they were a bit mismatched and when I saw them in place they looked like they had come from several different icon sets.

So these were heavily inspired by Picol, but a little more rounded and consistent with each other. The set took less than an hour.

How do you turn 3.9million internet pirates into 7million? A lesson in statistics.

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Where the British Government’s official figure on the level of illegal filesharing in the UK came from:

  • Survey 1,176 people
  • 136 admit of filesharing – that’s 11.6%
  • Beef that up a bit, some must have been lying: 16.3% sounds good.
  • Let’s assume there are 40million people in the country with net access
  • (Actual figure according to the ONS: 33.9m)
  • That’s a shocking 7million pirates in the UK!
  • (Actual figure: 3.9million)

And guess where the figure came from: Government > Forrester Research > Jupiter Research > Commissioned by the BPI, the music trade body. This stuff drives me batshit.

Droste experiment

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This is a finished image, but I’m not uploading it to flickr because I’m going to rework it. For starters, I’m going to remove the top foot that is poking into the spiral, and then maybe experiment with some other fun details.

The Droste illusion is fascinating, and I’m still experimenting. I’m planning to produce some real head-twisters.

More upcoming geek events in Cardiff

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Another list, primarily for my benefit, so I don't forget anything. Give me a shout if you're attending any of these, and let me know if I've missed some cool event.

Cardiff Photomarathon
Saturday June 20th
The deadline for entry was June 10th. I have my ticket and plan to be at the Wales Millennium Centre at 10am.

CardiffWebScene, Summer Meetup
16 July at Funky Buddha

WordCamp UK
18-19 July at Future Inn
I'm probably looking forward to this one the most. I need to get my WordPress blog up and running by then!
Tickets £35, still on sale.

Ignite Cardiff #3
15th October
I really enjoyed the last Ignite, so hopefully I'll make it to this one. No plans to talk myself!

Cardiff Design Festival
October
I don't know anything about this yet, but it sounds fun.

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There's a list of events at the Cardiff Web Scene site.

GUI design for a Google OS

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Last night I stumbled across this Photoshop mockup I have 2/3rds completed of a potential GUI for a Google operating system. This was created before Android, Chrome and Wave existed (as far as anyone knew) and is based on nothing but my own thinking.

I rather like the look of it, so I'm going to finish it off over the next few lunchbreaks. You’re welcome to share any thoughts you have on the subject in the comments.

A dirty little trick to get more followers on Twitter

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About a year ago I gave up caring who started following me on Twitter, largely because of the proliferation of blatant spammers. I put up a note on my bio saying that if people really wanted me to reciprocate, the should send me a message, and I would certainly follow back if they were an interesting real person, and not some spam account (or worse). This still seems perfectly reasonable to me.

More recently though I decided I should take a more active interest in those who choose to follow me. I started using the excellent Topify, which makes it easy to identify spammers and I check out anyone who seems interesting.

Consequently, I’ve spotted an annoying trend.

There are many, many users who follow about 200 more people than follow them back. They are taking advantage of the fact that about half of the people that they follow, will follow them back! For whatever reason a large number of people feel it is the done thing to just blindly follow back anyone who follows them, however spammy, offensive or bizarre the new follower is! Personally, I don’t understand this behaviour in the slightest: I don’t want spam in my Twitter stream – so I don’t follow spammers. It’s simple.

Nonetheless, if you want to steadily grow your follower base, add 100 new people a day. Then, after you’ve been doing this for a few days, go back and unfollow all those who didn’t follow you in return, while continuing to follow new people. This way your ratio will always be near enough 1:1, making you look legitimate and popular. Eventually, when you reach an acceptable target (say, 10,000 followers) you can have a big purge and get rid of a lot of the mindless sheep you have accumulated. Say, 20-30% of them. Now it looks like you are a power user. Any new visitors to your profile will assume that you are hugely important and that maybe they should listen to you too.

So there you go, now you can claim to be an SEO-demigod, and have huge numbers of low-quality followers seeming to back it up.

Or you could just use Twitter like a normal person.

Upcoming Geek events in Cardiff

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I've been in Cardiff for approaching a year now and it's about time I sought out the geek community. I'm following some of the local colour on Twitter, but have so far forgotten or been forced to miss the Linux User Group meetings, Trydan gatherings (always during working hours, grr!) and other fun meetups that have happened. (Although I did make it to the SWN new media presentations last year!)

Well, there's a whole bunch of geeky fun coming up over the next month, and I'm determined to attend most or all of them! This list was mostly written for my benefit, but I decided to share it here:

Moonwatch: Telescope Open Evenings, Cardiff School of Physics and Astronomy

Cardiff University Observatory will be
holding free Open Evenings on one or more of Monday 30th March to
Thursday 2nd April 2009 (weather permitting) from 5pm to 8pm. They will
also open Friday 3rd April if there is sufficient demand, or if the
weather is unfavourable earlier in the week.

Joint N.E.R.D. Geek Event / SWLUG meetup

Wed 1st April at 7pm
The Central Bar (Wetherspoons)

Ignite Cardiff presentations
With talks from:
Matthew Cashmore (Lonely Planet) – (title to be confirmed)

Tom Beardshaw (www.tombeardshaw.com/) – Lifestreaming
Pete Prior (http://nermal.org/) – CATaLOG
Suzi Wells – Infinity
DK (MediaSnakers) – Change
Denis Campbell (UK Progressive) – When School Ties and Party Organisations are not Enough to Win

Tim Millwood (http://millwoodonline.co.uk) – Drupal
Mike Ellis (http://variousbits.net/) – Everyware
Mark Stevenson (www.lifeinpixels.co.uk/) – Cardiff Twitter trends
Lloyd Morgan (http://LoneGunman.co.uk) – Vines and Minds
Rob May – How to survive the zombie apocalypse

Facebook event page
April 8th at 18:30 – 21:30
SodaBar, Mill Lane

University's 125th Anniversary Celebration Lectures
As part of the celebrations for the 125th Anniversary of the University, a number of lectures are being given by internationally renowned speakers from institutions across the world.  These lectures are free, but booking is required.

I'm planning on attending only two:

The Warped Side Of The Universe: From The Big Bang To Black Holes & Gravitational Waves
Professor Kip Thorne, California Institute of Theoretical Physics

16th April 2009 at 6pm – Julian Hodge Lecture Theatre, Julian Hodge Building, Column Drive.

Robots with Biological Brains and Humans With Part Machine Brains
Professor Kevin Warwick, University of Reading. In this presentation a look is taken at how the use of implant and
electrode technology can be employed to create biological brains for
robots, to enable human enhancement and to diminish the effects of
certain neural illnesses.

7th May at 7.00pm – Faculty Lecture Theatre, Manufacturing Engineering Centre, Queen's Building (T/2.09)

Openbox logout icons

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On and off for the last week I have been experimenting for pretty much the first time with some icon designs for an Openbox logout script being written by Nik_Doof for #! CrunchBang Linux.

I’ve attached a screenshot below of the 0.1 release in action, as well as some alternative icons. I plan to revamp the icons: I’m going to try a set making better use of PNG transparency, and also provide a smaller size (64×64?). Of course, I’ll also make the SVGs available in due course.

Any feedback is welcome!

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