Archive for May, 2009

Ubiquitous Computing video circa. 1991

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

“Coined by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s (PARC) Computer Science Laboratory (CSL), [Ubiquitous Computing] describes a vision of the future. Just as electric motors have disappeared into the background of everyday life, PARC scientists envision a future where mobile computational devices will be similarly transparent. Potentially numbering the 100s per person these devices are nothing like those you use today. They are mobile. They know their location, and they communicate with their environment.”

I have no idea if I’m allowed to put this up but it seems a desperate shame that this video isn’t held in one complete file, easily accessible to the public and to researchers, given the historical significance of the work conducted on ubicomp at PARC by Mark Weiser et al. during hte late 80s early 90s. Please see the original files here: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiMovies.html and read more about Mark Weiser by sticking his name in Google.

Please note that I had to edit out 2 minutes of the more technical stuff to get the video down to under 10mins.

del.icio.us vulnerability - hopefully solved!

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

28.05.09 UPDATE: After a bit of tinkering under the hood I hope to have abated the nefarious spam jiggery-pokery. I also have a shiny new install of wordpress, which is really quite impressive! I’m not too sure how the nerdowells got in but hopefully I can keep them out now.

27.05.09: So, I just found that a bunch of links (for things I really don’t want to link to!) were being appended to the posts on this site that came through from del.icio.us in the last month or so. I may halt that bookmark sharing to here for a while, if anyone has had experience of this issue and got to the bottom of it please let me know. Thanks!

links for 2009-05-19

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

Nonsense in the dark

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Here amongst this darkened room
a fork could compose a tune,
an ice cream float parade for lunch,
a boxer collapse drunk on punch.
Playing across this inky pitch
teaming dreams compete for thought, which
hang in gloom on hooks of ideas
stimulating both hopes and fears.
And yet I sit alone, unmoving,
the blank of dark obscure but soothing.
Round about my thoughts are strewn,
here amongst this darkened room.

links for 2009-05-18

Monday, May 18th, 2009
  • "As opposed to the desktop paradigm, in which users directly and consciously engage a single device for a specialized purpose, ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) envisions the engagement of many computational devices and systems simultaneously, in the course of ordinary activities, with users who may not necessarily even be aware of such an engagement. In that case, we have to rethink not only many ethical concepts, but also some very basic philosophical notions like reality and subjectivity. If the traditional reality of things develops into a computed ambience and if decisions taken in a certain situation are more and more dependent of artificial agents we may not even be aware of, then this will fundamentally change our basic understanding, not only of moral responsibility, but also of persons acting in the world itself. "

‘A Vision’ - Simon Armitage

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

The future was a beautiful place, once.
Remember the full-blown balsa-wood town
on public display in the Civic Hall.
The ring-bound sketches, artists’ impressions,
blueprints of smoked glass and tubular steel,
board-game suburbs, modes of transportation
like fairground rides or executive toys.
Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light.
And people like us at the bottle-bank
next to the cycle-path, or dog-walking
over tended strips of fuzzy-felt grass,
or motoring home in electric cars,
model drivers. Or after the late show -
strolling the boulevard. They were the plans,
all underwritten in the neat left-hand
of architects - a true, legible script.
I pulled that future out of the north wind
at the landfill site, stamped with today’s date,
riding the air with other such futures,
all unlived in and now fully extinct.

From Simon Armitage’s collection Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid.

Thamesmead South, London - a vision and an actuality

GLC Architects vision of Thamesmead South

Picture credit: Flickr user Iqbal Aalam

Thamesmead. Bexley. London

Pciture credit: Flickr user joseph beuys hat