Roger Hyam

Using a little app called Pano you can do in-phone panorama stitching. Fun.

Here is a story on the BBC about a USB device that you plug into your PC to enable it to be put to sleep at the touch of a single button. It is incredible that some one is selling a product to do that. For starters my Macs do it by default. Just close the lid of a laptop or touch the power button on a iMac and they go to sleep. They come back pretty instantly as well. The other point is that I am sure my old Dell desktop used to have the option to set the power button to do precisely this behaviour with Windows XP though of course it used to take hours to come back and used to crash on me etc. One could always set the PC to power down gracefully as you stop using it i.e slow the disc then the screen then the processor and full sleep after a few minutes of non-use but that would take more thought.

There is nothing like a gaget to fix bad design and sloppy thinking. They’ll make a fortune with it.

Well I wrote a basic application that would allow people to sit together virtually and I tried it out on my own. I logged in and logged out at the beginning and end of a couple of sessions and the whole thing seemed really unsatisfactory. This means I must break the first precept and kill the iZendo concept stone dead. It is a shame but there you have it.

So I start writing iZendo from scratch and make quite good progress in simplifying it down. Just four pages and some AJAX to update the lists. All looks good till my crisis of faith! Could I do this with twitter? Could I ‘just’ have a Twitter feed that is the virtual zendo? It would certainly save a lot of effort and would integrate with all the IM and phone systems etc.

The trouble is I can’t see how we get a public page that updates in near real time to show  messages from multiple people. The zendo would have to follow people and look for messages that said they were meditating or it would have to wait for direct messages and post them back as messages on its own page so others could see them. None of these things work. Even if I used the API the app would need to poll the server all the time and there can be quite long delays on this. We are limited to once a minute for starters. This would need to run on a ‘real’ server not a hosted space.

Looks like it isn’t feasible but maybe I should sleep on it.

Thanks for listening,