Day: 4 May 2004

Calling from munich, germany

So i'm hoping this goes through on to my blog before Wednesday, as I
should beable to send this blog as an email to blojsoms moblogging
plugin from my ipaq. Now unfortunately I tried to send a couple of
emails from work on friday but they never ended up on the blog, for some
unknown reason. Anyway will look into it when I get back from holiday.

Yes this time in munich, germany. And i'm happy to say international
gprs roaming with orange via tmobile is working a treat. Actually
working better than America and even some parts of south london I would
say. I'm in studentenwerk north munich and the gprs is actually quite
quick. All I need to do now is sort out my email accounts so at least of
them will send email from my ipaq. Honesty I even signed up with hotpop
so I could get it working. Should have signed up with orange's email
really, but its long and complex…

Anyway here's to moblogging from abroad…
*raised wine glass* from my sisters apartment in studentenwerk, munich.

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BBC’s DIRAC codecs

Matt web and tom coats seem to be doing a lot of interesting things in
bbc radio and
music. But I heard about bbc's open source
sourceforge project called DIRAC through this weeks NTK.net. Its basically a experimental video
codec like ogg theora. It supports resolutions
from quarter cif to 1080 hdtv progressive or interlaced.
Oddly it also uses wavelets and motion compensation as well the patent
tricky area of Arithmetic coding.
Anyway i'm going to try it out and if its good, i'm thinking we could
use it for the copyright vs community
lectures. But I douht its ready for
such use, saying that we could get some support from the bbc if I ask
really nicely? maybe? Worth a email I would say, wouldn't you?

I am hoping to push some of this type of innovation into the world
service. Theres already an opportunity to do some work on blogging for
43 different languages. Hence why i'm watching blojsom's
Internationalization. Thinking of bringing some of the work with HP's
semantic blogger to the world service. I mean blojsom is that flexible.
Only problem is were using mainly perl and cgi on the backend with
server side includes at the final stage. Don’t think this much of a
secret because everyone can see bbc.co.uk uses *.shtml. Anyway blojsom
with a bit of xsl 1.1 or even 1.0 could create static pages if needed.
More about xsl 1.1 soon I think.

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Programme guides all around

Been thinking about electronic/internet programme guides once again.

Someone in digital home asked the question about which Freeview PVR box to get. They recommended the fusion digital FRVT-100 over everything else. Including the Humax and Pace. Now I never heard of it but I'm wondering why they prefer it to the others? Is it only because it has its own propitery 7day EPG. While the others only have the now and next feature, hardly EPG contendars. But what will happen when the BBC do there 7 day EPG in summer/winter? Hummm?

Anyway while away I also saw a url in a magazine for tvtv.co.uk which seems more useable than anything else I've seen recently. Then that got me thinking why dont i create a xsl to transform there listings into xmltv? Then I started thinking wheres the tv_grab_uk? blah blah hit richards blog, interesting read might actually subscribe the rss. But I really want a xsl version of that… Cocoon's pipelines could easily handle it.
I'm going to scream… maybe annanova should give up the source files, so someone at the bbc can provide the same for the radio times, cause the current setup of the radio times is terrable…give me a break

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