I’ve somehow managed to get myself onto the Microsoft Popfly Alpha list. So, what is it?

Microsoft® Popfly™ is a web site and tool to help people create and share web sites, mashups, and other kinds of experiences.

It’s definitely web 2.0 then. It has social networking, it has mash-ups, things move, spin, dance and roll around while you’re creating things like you’re Doc Brown on acid. It even makes impressive use of MS Silverlight that makes you go “ooooh”. Within 5 minutes of signing in, I had an application that retrieves all my photos from facebook, and shows them in a list. I can use this on a web page, the Vista sidebar, my popfly homepage, or on my Live Space page. Five minutes. I didn’t have to write a single line of code. Very soon, I may be out of a job.

Okay, it’s a terrible example I know - there’s no mashing going on, but it does demonstrate how incredibly easy it’s become to interact with these services, and Facebook is a only a small speck on the landscape of choices. The usual suspects; Flickr, Twitter and Digg are all there as well as BBC Travel, Warcraft, Virtual Earth, even Google Checkout jump out at me in the possible mash-up list. What you get to do with Warcraft, I don’t know…yet.

Dan commented briefly this morning, that Facebook may be taking over the world, but I’m convinced this kind of service interaction is unnatural and quite possibly a part of those ONE campaigns Bono is always going on about - that we’ve all been promised is one of the early steps on the road to The Apocalypse.

Well, I’ve decided this blog was getting far too technology-based over the last few entries. I’m in desperate need of another hobby, writing about my travels is all very well - but I only have 27 days holiday each year to spare for that sort of thing. Code is falling in from the ceiling and spilling out onto the posts. In my deepest moments of insanity I’ve starting writing about branding. Being able to claim the moral high ground in the past, I’ve now found myself getting into debates over logos, design and the public perception.

Well it has to change. Right now.. So this evening is all about the introduction to my Myth TV posts, which will serve as some sort of inadequate guide to getting an open-source media center up and running with digital tv recording, playback, tv guides as well as all the networkable, internet-ready, upgradeable, linux hardware hell you’d expect from such a project. Much more fun than going down the shop and buying a complete system. You can’t imagine.

Wait. Shit.

Okay, there will be code. There will certainly be text-only configuration files. Hopefully, I can get a llama in there somewhere… Hopefully.

In Sri Lanka it was 28°C today, according to weather.com. London managed to boast a rather more unhealthy 19°C. However, inside the office at my desk, we managed a more impressive 33.5°C - so a partial win for London. In temperatures such as these most people can be found staring idly at their monitors, mouth open and eyes wide. It was in a similar catatonic state that I came to learn about the wonderful creature called the Loris.

The obscenely cute animal to your right is a Slender Loris, a nocturnal creature found in the rainforests of Sri Lanka. Whilst I don’t recommend writing to your local councilman this instant, to complain about these animals being under threat from logging, urban expansion, and all the rest of the usual culprits for rainforest depletion… I would highly recommend you stare at the picture a little longer, and exasperate an “awwww, but it’s so cu-uuute”.

I’ve never heard of these little primates before. So it was with a renewed sense of glee and excitement that I started clicking around randomly to find more about them. Apparently the Sinhalese have a proverb “unahapuluwa ge daruwa oota menika lu”. To you and me, that’s “the loris’ young one is a gem to her”. Or more plainly, “see that baby loris? Only a mother could love that thing”. Well, yes, they might look like gremlins and maybe they act like them too. But look at those eyes!

That’s Sri Lanka firmly on my “places to visit” list then Tell a friend about the Loris today.

The big news of the day is the unveiling of the London 2012 logo. There’s no denying the 12,149 signatures on the “Change The London 2012 Logo” petition. The logo had quite clearly made its mark on the population. And why not? We’ll be seeing this logo and branding that it implies for the next 5 years at least.

I don’t like to tackle the contentious minefield that is design and branding. It’s better left to people who give a damn in my opinion, which perhaps isn’t the most healthy stance for a web-site developer. But… I can make random analogies for anything, and they easily spiral out of control…

A brand is a lot like an iceberg, see. You can only give it a gentle shove in the general direction you want to go in. Standing on the shore you can shout encouragement or wave it off - but you’re still on the shore. It’s out there and sometimes there’s not a lot you can do except for frantic splashing in the waves. The best brands will evolve, picking up more icebergs along the way until one of two things happens.

1. It’s a huge success, travels for thousands of miles, but they eventually reach warmer climates, melt, and disappear. In which case you’re going to need another block of ice.
2. Your brand gets in the way of another body at sea. It causes unimaginable damage to everything around it as well as itself. It’s time to walk back down the beach and pretend you were nowhere near it when it drifted free.

So to get back to the point. Which of these is the London 2012 logo? Well it’s different, which some might call brave, or stupid. It’s brightly coloured and stands out, which is meant to appeal to the young people of now and 2012. Actually, let’s not circle this point any longer. It’s ridiculously stupid, is what it is. It lacks the finesse of London 2012 candidate city logo and absolutely deserves the ‘Lisa Simpson giving head’ description circulating all around the country at the moment.

And therein lies the genius. No publicity is bad publicity and everyone is talking about it. I don’t feel it represents the England of today, or tomorrow for that matter. But it is simple and already stands out as London 2012 Olympics. Wherever the London 2012 committee want to take this branding or whatever it was supposed to mean at conception - it’s released and it’s out at sea. Maybe we can all help it along in the right direction.

Continuing the theme of geeking out this weekend, I’ve taken the plunge and upgraded my server to Fedora 7.

The usual suspects caused problems with the upgrade, namely.

Yum getting confused
Make sure you delete all your repos from yum, before you start with the post-install update. You might want to add back in the new atrpms, and livna repos.

atprms - /etc/yum.repos.d/atrpms.repo
[atrpms]
name=Fedora 7 - i386 - ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f7-i386/atrpms/stable

livna
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/7/i386/livna-release-7-2.noarch.rpm

Madwifi-based network card

Grab the latest drivers from the atrpms repos
rpm -Uvh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/madwifi-kmdl-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7-0.9.4-36_r2321.fc7.i686.rpm http://dl.atrpms.net/all/madwifi-hal-kmdl-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7-0.9.4-36_r2321.fc7.i686.rpm http://dl.atrpms.net/all/madwifi-0.9.4-36_r2321.fc7.i386.rpm

And before you try and restart you network, don’t forget to reload the driver once they’re installed.
modprobe -va ath_pci
/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart

cyrus-imapd fails to load via init.d scripts

Database exports fail (see errors in /var/lib/imap/rpm/db_export.log). This problem is still open, but cyrus-imapd can still be loaded directly through

/usr/lib/cyrus-imapd/cyrus-master &

eth1394 is not ported yet

Also, still open for the time being. eth1394 hasn’t been ported to the new FireWire stack yet. To be updated when I have a solution. If you’ve got one yourself, please do add a comment