Monday, February 23, 2004

Full Tilt Gaming Phones. Novel Use for Smartphone Cameras in New Game "German game developer and publisher Mobile Scope has announced that a new version of its popular Moorhen game is to be introduced in March 2004, dubbed Moorhen Camera X. Unlike previous versions of the game which have relied on navigational pads for input, this latest edition will draw upon the capabilities of integrated cameras found in smartphones to provide what appears to be an entirely new user experience. As a 2D shooter where hens are the primary target, players have thus far aimed manually to be able to take out hens. Innovatively, Moorhen Camera X makes use of the camera of the device on which it is running to position a cursor relative to player movements, comparing picture data frame-by-frame to determine in which direction the handset is being moved." [infoSync] Well, this would definitely blow my cover in meetings, and I'm trying to picture a bus full of cameraphone users pointing, tilting, aiming, shooting, etc., but I'm still intrigued. [The Shifted Librarian] 10:49:40 PM      Google It!.

News Aggregators Getting New Features. New NewsGator Extensions "NewsGator users: check out Greg Reinacker's blog.... Extensions include a cool calendar extension that takes feeds and ads them to Outlooks calendar. Also one that looks at feeds that don't push down all the content (lame lame lame, if you're one of the feeds that does that) and lets you slurp up all the content. I love THAT!" [Scobleizer] AmphetaRate "AmphetaRate RSS Recommendation is the first RSS recommendation server. It calculates your likes / dislikes to create a personalized RSS recommendation feed. We also currently provide an aggregator based on AmphetaDesk to communicate to AmphetaRate." [Lockergnome's RSS Resource] "You might want to check out FeedDemon by Nick Bradbury. While it comes with default style sheets, users are able to create their own XSL for efficiently processing the information. So, if you wanted to view just the first paragraph, you could create your own style or ask someone in the community to create one. Radek, an active community member, has created styles that hint at what can be achieved with this combination, from rating your feeds in a database, to creating powerful MindMaps." [Note to Self, via Jon's Radio] I think all of these indicate that we're seeing a new phase for news aggregators. The first months of 2004 are going to be a major marker on a future timeline showing progress on the march towards maturation. [The Shifted Librarian] 9:41:23 AM      Google It!.

University of Maryland Campus weblog use could explode - Adam Lewis, Daily Diamondback. While some view blogs as an online "Dear Diary," members of the university community are challenging that idea, using them as educational aids in classes and business ventures.... "Our team has looked into a variety of blog systems to bring on to cam [Online Learning Update] 9:35:57 AM      Google It!.

Lightweight XML search servers, part 2. In last month's installment I showed a simple search service that uses libxslt to reduce a file of XML content (my weblog writing) to just the elements matching an XPath expression. This month's challenge was to scale up to a database-backed implementation using Berkeley DB XML. [Full story at XML.com] After looking at my implementation, John Merrells, the creator of DB XML, wrote to ask why I was using the libxml2 XPath feature to search within documents returned by DB XML XPath queries. Didn't I know that DB XML offered a document-level XPath query function, as well as a database-level one? Heh. Actually, I hadn't known. ... [Jon's Radio] 9:33:24 AM      Google It!.

WS-WorldPeace. Here's one popular definition of insanity: "Do the same thing, expect a different result." Now consider the following partial list of proposed standards for Web services: WS-Addressing, WS-AtomicTransaction, WS-Attachments, WS-Context, WS-Coordination, WS-Eventing, WS-Federation, WS-Reliability, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Routing, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Transaction, and WS-Trust. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] The original title of this column was WS-WorldPeace, so I've used that title here because I still like it better. But this is the same column as the one in the current print edition of InfoWorld entitled Web services alphabet soup. In the column, I interview Microsoft's John Shewchuk on the question of why this round of small, modular specifications is arguably not a replay of past sins, and how Indigo intends to help developers get a handle on "composable complexity." ... [Jon's Radio] 9:32:02 AM      Google It!.

The Future PC as a Set of Pens? [Slashdot] 9:30:15 AM      Google It!.