Simon’s Backup Weblog


Transatlantic conventioneering

Posted in Uncategorized by Simon Bisson on April 26, 2007

I seem to have bought Baycon memberships for myself and .

We had a ball at the last one we attended, so we’re looking forward to seeing lots of folk again…

Travel Plans

Posted in Uncategorized by Simon Bisson on April 26, 2007

It’s spring, it’s conference season and we’re off on the road…

If you’d like to meet up with us for business or pleasure, here’s where we expect to be and when.

April 27 Fly to Las Vegas via LAX
April 30 – May 3 MIX 07 and MEDC in Las Vegas
May 4 – 7 (Zion National Park and environs)
May 8 – 10 Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando
May 11 – 17 Los Angeles – Windows Hardware Engineering conference and meeting time
May 18 – 21 San Jose: Maker’s Faire in San Mateo, Salesforce.com Developer Day
May 22 – 25 Future in Review in San Diego
May 26 – June 3 San Jose (May 29 – 30 Where 2.0 in San Jose)
June 4 – 8 TechEd in Orlando
June 11 Fly back to London

Do get in touch if you have projects, clients, lunch ideas or events you think we’d be interested along the way.

A gentle lowing sound…

Posted in Uncategorized by Simon Bisson on April 26, 2007

…as my Moo cards arrive.

Oooh, they’re pretty!

I wasn’t sure how they would come out, as they’re slices cropped through photographs, but I’m really quite pleased with how they came out.

Pimp my words: Piloting Apollo – an interview with Adobe’s Mike Downey.

Posted in Uncategorized by Simon Bisson on April 26, 2007

Last week I met up with Adobe’s Mike Downey to talk about Apollo. Here’s the result of our conversation, a piece now up on the Developer Register.

Adobe’s senior product manager for Apollo, Mike Downey was in London last week. We met him at Adobe’s Regents Park offices, and in a wide ranging conversation we talked about the past, the present and the future of Apollo.

Downey worked with some of the most senior engineers in the company to develop Apollo: “It’s the highest profile project in the company”, he says.

Read more – and get my scoop on some of Adobe’s plans for the next release…

Colours Above Us

Posted in Uncategorized by Simon Bisson on April 26, 2007

Colours Above Us
Originally uploaded by sbisson.

Coloured lighting in the recessed ceiling of the Barbican concert hall foyer.

London
April 2007

Making (web)Comics

Posted in Uncategorized by Simon Bisson on April 26, 2007

The first two parts of Scott McCloud‘s micropayment experiment are now available for all to see.

The Right Number” is a Flash-based comic that uses an intriguing panel zoom approach to tell a story of “math, sex, obsession and phone numbers”. Part three will follow at some point in the future.

Pimp our other blog: Imaging the City.

Posted in Uncategorized by Simon Bisson on April 25, 2007

Over at IT Pro I’ve been writing about Danyel Fisher’s “How we watch the city” paper. It’s a fascinating look at how we can use geographical search data to see how places grab our attention. I’m becoming more and more fascinated by the idea of “attention”, and how we can work with collections of attention data. I suspect it’s going to become one of the key approaches to understanding interaction context.

I’ve been reading a fascinating paper by Danyel Fisher, of Microsoft Research. He’s one of the folk behind the SNARF email triage tool, and is currently looking at how people use online maps.

“How we watch the City” is surprisingly beautiful (in the way many computer-mediated visualisations are). To show how people and searches gravitate to specific places he’s created an application that draws a heat map over Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, letting him zoom into the “hottest” searches, bright clusters that illuminate the virtual space of the search engine. With access to the services search logs, he can show just how searches relate to geography.

Here’s one of his images, a look at how map searches of Las Vegas focus on the Strip.

Our eyes are bright in the digital world.

A new source of “entertaining” user icons and memes…

Posted in Uncategorized by Simon Bisson on April 25, 2007

The online Miieditor can save out Miis as 100 x 100 jpegs.

So I had a go with it, and ended up like this:

Oh dear… I’m not sure if it’s convincing, but it’s certainly fun, tweaking all the options to try and get the right image!

So how quickly will having a mii become a miime?

Even in the dark, they move…

Posted in Uncategorized by Simon Bisson on April 25, 2007

Even in the dark, they move...

Pedestrians blur in and out of existence, as they walk across Hungerford Bridge, on a warm spring night.

Sometimes everything comes together…

Posted in Uncategorized by Simon Bisson on April 24, 2007

…and the folk at Salesforce.com have asked me to present my Pipes/JSON cross-domain mashup at their developer conference.

had finally persuaded me to email one of my contacts on their developer team last night, when I found myself down one of the many dead ends this little project had left me, and I’ve been talking with him about the various approaches I was attempting – so I let him know when I finally got my live weather map code working this afternoon.

I’m not sure if I’m able to be there, but it’s rather nice to have the last couple of days of banging my head on my keyboard validated.

Ah, the nice feel of concentrated egoboo. Especially when it’s delivered in a field I see myself much more as observer than participant these days.

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