Remember the video version of seesmic, the one that spawned.the francofous?
Things changed for two reasons. Bandwidth issues and ressources. Flash would suck down the laptop battery within a few minutes. It meant that you could.only Seesmic from a fixed position.
With html5 that problem will dissapear. What I look forward to is an HTML 5 optimized version. It could result in a greater number of users on less powerful machines.
I hope we see a growth in users and a more international set of users. I hope they also add more features at the same time.
Let us see whether Seesmic take advantage of this opportunity.
Today I was pleasantly surprised after racketing in the mountains to discover that my phone’s battery had not depleted. I was using sportstracker for over two hours and some charge was still left after an hour and a half. There was so much battery left in fact I went for nine more kilometers of walking and still the battery is healthy.
That’s not the only thing that’s improved. Now you have maps. You can’t move around the map except by changing geographic location but you can see the roads around you and more. It’s much simpler than google maps but then again there’s no need for such accuracy anyway.
Now I can spend half a day walking and still have enough power to be tracked the whole way. I know, half a day isn’t that long. Still better than an hour or two though.
The lac de Joux eventually froze over completely. As a result of this you could walk on the ice. Some people were kitesurfing whilst others were having Marrons chaud. In one or two places you could see that the water level had decreased as a result of which the ice sheet had broken.
Walking across the ice was an interesting experience. The ice can be seen through. Due to recent snow melt on the ice you were walking through a few centimeters of water in place. The feeling is disconcerting.
Enjoy the beauty.
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Monkey Thieves is a documentary about the Gulta Gang, a gang of monkeys in India wreaking havoc. What I love about this documentary is that it’s a great topic in HD. You see all the details. You see the faces, you see how they eat a grape but throw away the skin for example. You see wide shots of the city and you see other animals.
It’s all about the visual wealth that documentaries can offer you. It’s just a well shot and humorous look at monkey behaviour. You see smiling faces in the background. The scene is monkeys stealing ice creams and eating them. They hold it with the stick, take little bites and more.
The Worldcommunity grid is a datagrid style project where almost half a million people are offering computer cycles to help advance scientific research in a number of fields such as health, nutrition and more. One of the most recent projects to be added to the collection is the one for Influenza. If you so chose you can help speed up the process of finding a solution to the influenza problem.
There is an interesting documentary on History HD called The Virus empire which uses a number of interviews with WHO officials and actors to demonstrate why over-hyping a new virus is the smart thing to do. One interviewee in particular said “If you went back to an army doctor in 1918 and told him that whilst 170 people had died already up to 50 million could die within the year from the Spanish Flu then he would have told you to go back to the 21st century.” What was poignant with this statement is the blasé nature that some people showed towards Swine Flu in certain circumstances.
Two or three weeks ago they said that it may take up to four months to find a solution to the Swine Flu virus. Now take into account the WHO’s effort to get a number of research labs to work in collaboration against the SARS virus and it’s interesting. Apparently it took four days to learn everything there was to know about the nature of the virus but not how to cure it.
That’s where the World Community grid Influenza project comes in. The more computers are used to run models to see which are the best solutions to research the quicker we may have a way of dealing with this new virus.
The project is free and here are the projects you can currently help with;
Help Fight Childhood Cancer
Influenza Antiviral Drug Search
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy – Phase 2
FightAIDS@Home
Human Proteome Folding – Phase 2
Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together
Help Conquer Cancer
Nutritious Rice for the World
The Clean Energy Project
Today was the Global Action day for Burma. The event was centered around a march from the Tate Britain, via the Houses of Parliament before arriving at Trafalgar Square at which point several speeches were made.
You can recognise those who were part of the protest for the red ribbons they wore and the t-shirts.
I met two friends who were taking photographs, Danfung Dennis and Crina Boros. Danfung has had quite a few interesting assignments. Crina was doing an MA whilst I was completing my final year of studies.