CCau are proud to announce that registration is now officially open for the Creative Commons 'Building an Australasian Commons' Conference.

The conference will be held on Tuesday 24th June 2008 from 8.30am – 5pm at the State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane, and is proudly supported by Creative Commons Australia (http://creativecommons.org.au), the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (http://www.cci.edu.aau), and the State Library of Queensland (http://www.slq.qld.gov.au).

back in the mid 90s or so I used to hang out on a couple of moos with some of the outlook crowd. I found one of my old notebooks on the bookshelf during this trip home and it has some of my notes on how to connect and lists the urls etc also. I used to use the name Alia back then though the name became too popular so a few years later I added the K for Kath/Kathy and became AliaK. one of the pages has my notes on how to request my name.

here's some of the notebook pages. I used to make the notebooks out of old 5.25" floppy disks and recycled paper from work - these disks weren't being used as often by this stage.. amazing how times change!!

I remember making a hammock that swung softly when someone sat in it and a room called blacony - nothing too flash compared to what the others were doing but it all worked ok! one day I'll have to go through some old disks and see if I can find any files from back then, that's if the disks even spin up at all..

Second Life devleopers community resource site. visit http://sldevelopers.com/ for more details

earlier this year I did a max/msp course at goldsmiths college. the class was taken by the very clever and talented sebastian lexer who puts on the interlace events in london and performs at various events and festivals. if you're looking for a max/msp course, I highly recommend this one - whether you've used max/msp before or not. the projects by the other class members were really cool also!

apart from the class notes I took we had to do a little project for the last day (4th day). I'd recently gone on the gps for artists workshop on Isle of Wight and bought myself a handheld gps device to record data on the driving trips I was doing. so, for my project, I made, with a lot of help from Sebastian! a patch which read gps data from a file, then parsed it into smaller sections to break it down into the different fields such as longitude & latitude, speed, direction, time, altitude etc. then I connected these values to the inputs of a vst filter/plugin called ambience, and played an audio recording and had the gps data adjust the filter parameters by stepping through the gps co-ordinates. also, the longitude & latitude are mapped to an x & y co-ordinate of a graph, so when the gps points are moved, you can see the x/y co-ords move too. for this version of the patch, I selected co-ords which would move around the screen according to the scale I chose. obviously if the area travelled is quite close, then the scale needs to be adjusted or you won't see much movement.

one day I'd like to expand the project so the gps data generates a music soundscape using samples I've recorded along the way. also it'll display geotagged photos taken on the journey as the gps points are processed.

attached is a screen shot of the patch and the actual patch, and some sample gps data. if you want to try it then you'd need your own audio file to open (any will do) and have the ambience vst plugin.

O'Reilly killer apps mentioned in the audio recording of e-Tech 2004 from archive.org

social software - harnessing the power of use contributions & user participation:

successful platforms using social software:

The internet has been ablaze recently with talk of map products from Google and similar plans from Microsoft. These additions are really cool to look at but do not seem to offer real value or things to do in the worlds. As an avid gamer, I was questioning, haven't we seen similar things from games in the past. Last year we saw the release of True Crimes: Streets of L.A. and The Getaway (based in London).

Sponsored by backstage.bbc.co.uk, Open Tech 2005 is an informal one-day conference about technologies that anyone can have a go at, from "Open Source"-style ways of working to repurposing everyday everyday electronics hardware. read more or visit http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2005/ for details