Month: October 2004

Audio and PDF Excerpt

Doug Kaye's post about Audio Excerpt Blogging is great reading and put a smile on my face. If it is possible to grab a subpart of a mp3 file using a RESTful interface, i would be very happy.
However, something hits odd about using all this other methods to do it (flash, quicktime, etc). Why not just use Smil to do this? It has features to deal with snips of audio already. Plus it has features which you guys will be pleading for soon. I mean who wants to listen to a 2min piece at 56k when there on a T1 connection. Using the switch element you can draw from different sources based on connection speed and other things. Hell, you can even use the same method to take a subpart of a video file… Smil is the way forward for sure, trust me on this one gillmor gang.

However Jon Udells post about Page addressable PDF is pretty cool and I'll be using that more from now on.

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Web 1.0 heads and the digital renaissance

Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham

Recently I've been using Web 2.0 to describe the evolution of the web from pages to webservices, syndication, blogs, wiki's, etc. It comes mainly from the web 2.0 conference and from talking to miles recently. But I've been thinking about this in more depth. Am I too hard on people around me for being transfixed on web 1.0 and not interested in web 2.0? Well I was thinking that till today.

I was talking to a Student about how his disertation. And he told me his disertation tutor pointed him at http://www.webmonkey.com and http://www.lynda.com, cos he thought they were the cutting edge of the internet. I put my face in my hands when he told me this. And I felt the urge to drop a email off to a couple of key people. He's the key points after the a couple of replies.

From the student
I hope I haven't tarnished this guy's reputation too much – although he has a total 1995 mindset he's open to knowing about the new stuff and he promised to go off and research the semantic web and web standards like a good little student, err tutor.

I think the basic thing this all boils down to (and should form the basis of my dissertation) is that the visual approach to problem solving is getting left behind. Web 2.0 is amazing, but its only powered by linguistic and scientific thinking.

This means that apart from a few examples like nicely designed RSS readers, mezzoblue.com and newsmap, Web 2.0 *looks* and *feels* like shit, and until it looks and feels nice no traditional design tutors will understand it. This is the vicious circle which is keeping visually-thinking designers and artists from getting involved in Web 2.0.

Fair point by the student but flawed because why should web 2.0 have to pull along those who are interested in life long learning and evolving?

From Miles
Err. I think the problem is that visually thinking designers and artists are stuck in 1995 and not getting involved in Web 2.0. There's no point complaining something looks crap if you don't get involved. One would have thought that that's precisely where designers find business oppprtunities. It's not that your tutor has been alienated by all the geek-speak, it's that he hasn't seized the artistic and creative opportunities and got involved. Semwebbers tend to alienate linguistic people and cognitive scientists, too, because their ontologies and semantics are algorithmic, and pay little attention to the way people use language. The difference is, linguists and cog-sci people are getting involved, whilst designers are still saying, I hear you can earn a ton of money if you learn Flash.

Part of this is the tragic two cultures divide in the English speaking middle-classes, but another part is the speed of change. Designers are still gabbing about how the web's not proper design because they can't do precise page layout and font control whilst web 2.0 is moving on with a whole new set of ideas saying, Look, this page layout thing is a bit of an irrelevance. Deal with it and move on – if it even cares what a bunch of quarkheads think.

The point is that creative innovation has always taken place at the nexus of both cultures. As any fool knows from a trip round the national gallery, the revolution in aesthetics in the Renaissance (the reason you can spot a mediaeval painting a mile off, but have difficulty dating post-renaissance painting unless you are an expert) was the marriage of science (perspective, optics) and technology (oil-paints, optical tools) with a new aesthetic vision (expanded trade of European city states, and early colonialism, and the “outside look” that brought with it). Renaissance painters were more like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs than “artists” – they were businessmen (and women), technology innovators, inventors as much as artists.
The ones who stayed painting out-of-perspective pictures of knights, dragons and madonnas on wooden board with gesso, who stayed out of all that Painting 2.0 stuff because it looked and felt shit, and was dominated by technical thinking, those… you never heard of.

A book comes to mind when reading this – Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. This isnt what Miles is talking about, but the idea of hackers and painters is interesting and consistent with my idea of the current renaissance. The hackers are the painters…

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If Hollyoaks.com can get it right…

Sarahs a regular at http://hollyoaks.com and noticed during the show today that the stylesheet was missing for a couple of minutes. Then the new style came into effect. I had to natrually check it out. There using Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.0. Theres a bit of Javascript mainly to control the multiple stylesheets which is pretty nice as the default yellow is not great on top of white and the open and close elements which work on all the browsers I've tested it on (opera, firefox, ie and mozilla). Two other things which impressed me. Decent print stylesheet and RSS versions 1.0 and 2.0. Shame the RSS feeds dont contain more than a single paragraph, but its pretty much what everyone else is doing anyway. What I find also really interesting is the link to Mezzoblue about what is RSS and the Accessability statement which is pretty good. On the bad side, its a really shame there not using more semantic elements instead of divs with multiple ids and classes but its all a huge change from the old website.

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Xbox media centre and enclosures

I upgraded my Xbox media centre version about 2 weeks ago from 1.0 to a September CVS compiled version. Well before anything else, the speed is great and everything seems a lot tighter than before. But there's also a whole host of other things which can be easily missed if you dont look for them. Theres tons of screenshots which I did myself to show some features.

New submenu system

First obvious thing, there's a new submenu on the first screen. This can easily be over looked because it looks like restart rather than a menu. I have not looked into how to control this yet, but I will. In the menu there is a couple of Python scripts. Xbox trailers and Movie trailers do what they say on the menu, stream the latest clips to your xbox.

For example the above is what happens when you select movie trailers. It queries http://www.apple.com/trailers and lists them like most other things in xbmc. You can then select a trailer and it will give you options to progressive stream the low, medium or high quality version. Its that simple and its pretty much the same for xbox trailers but a different site.

So I've been thinking about this feature. First thing I really want to learn some Python so I can mess with the scripts and learn to point the scripts and site media I would love to watch on my tv. Also is there a way to do this without hardcoding the url into the script? So maybe you can type it in using the onscreen keyboard or even using the onscreen keyboard type in a url and it returns all the links and media links? So pointing it at something like the bbc world service site would you give you loads of links to pictures and a couple to the real audio stream. This really could do away with stream pack if it worked well.

And talking of streampack, I have been pretty impressed with the ability to watch live tv from all around the world and watch webcams etc. But Streampack is ignoying because its all messy and very flat in structure (even though you could change it yourself). And sometimes I just want http://www.shoutcast.com type listings. Well I got it now using the KML browser?



Very cool you have to admit…? But I want more! This got me thinking, with the whole hype around audio enclosures. Why doesnt someone write a RSS reader with enclosure support? So everyday I could read the news or blog headlines briefly and opt to download the audio or even video? This also reminds me, xbmc can rip audio streams to the hard drive but it doesnt have the extra logic of streamripper. Come on you know the xbox would be ideal for ripping music legally from shoutcast and the like. I guess the only thing to add before this would be the ability to rip to a smb or xbms connection as the usual 8gig xbox drive would be filled up with tunes before you knew it. And that would also go if the ability to rip video existed for xbmc. Imagine that? The way I see it, xbmc caches loads of streams anyway, theres no reason why it cant just build a complete file and offer it the filesystem as a complete file. is there?

Anyway theres more bits and pieces in the newer version, I've added some screen shots instead of talking about each little feature.



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Creative Archive lecture

The bbc creative archive lecture - friday 8th october

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had no option but to move the BBC Creative Archive project lecture forward to 1:30pm today.

Guest lecture forum.

There will be a live chat room and discussion forum for all students, staff and guests to ask questions and discuss the creaitive archive and creative commons before and after the lecture. It is advised that any burning questions should be posted to the forum before the lecture, so they can stand a chance of being read out during the Questions and Answers portion of the lecture.

There will also be a live audio stream for all to listen to during the event. Feel free to forward this entry on to others who may be interested.

After the event
I've posted up the pictures from yesterday. I am currently working on the audio which is safe on 2 hard drives. Its in 128k mp3 format right now, but I will convert it to a few others today once I've cleaned it up. I may also chop it up a bit. With regards to the video, its still on the imac which we used for capturing /images/emoticons/laugh.gifV tapes suck as we all know). I'm hoping I can transfer the lot over to a powerbook and sort out that footage as well as the copyright vs community lecture videos.

I dont know what everyone else thought, but besides the audio problems with the stream and the lack of a DV camera tripod. It all went quite well in the end. Actually thinking back there was a major blow to the online side of things when Roman tested the learn.rave site to see if he could post a few questions. Low and behold guests were not able to post on the forum and join the chat session. I tried to change it so guests could join and post but moodle was not having none of it. Because of this I never told students to login and so when they were urged to login, they did not know there raveID and password would work. Serious case of test it yourself beforehand, would have highlighted the problem in advance! Oh well…

In the after meeting, it was discussed that Paula's lecture was so fantastic and made so much sense that it was like a breath of fresh air. But it was a real shame that only 4 members of staff turned up in the end. Saying that we dont know who was listening in, we have not looked at the logs yet. The break came perfectly timed which was great and Jamie's comment about the Creative commons being typicaly american made him look very bad in the audiences eyes. Even I was suprised to see Mylz, JC and few others argue back against him. Maybe the message of the day was not lost on the audience?

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Enclosures and Links

In blojsom theres 4 types of content syndication available to you, RSS 0.91, RDF 1.0, RSS 2.0 and ATOM 0.3. Well I've got rid of the RSS 0.91 icons and prefer people grab the others. But realisticly its all the same content at the moment. However I'm going to start experiementing with Enclosures in the RSS 2.0 feed. It relates back to some thinking earlier. At the same time I'm thinking of trying out Greg G's idea of using the Link element in ATOM to do the same. The first piece of content I'm considering adding is related pictures based on not the title but metadata which I'm going to add to every blog entry in the near future. So if theres metadata and the flavor is RSS 2.0 or ATOM it will add an enclosure to pull in a picture from Flickr. For example on this post I've added metadata hyde park(meta-keyword=hydepark). Which when searched in flickr will generate this page. So I will grab the first one and attach it as a flash file? What would be better is if I could filter by cc only licenced photos. Shame Open photo doesnt have a better system behind it. I'm also considering putting cocoon somewhere in the middle of the process so I can use xsl to transform content rather than using vm templates. One of the things which has made me think about this area more is this posted by doc searls.

By the way this would be the search string which would be generated – http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-nc-sa-2.0/tags/hydepark and I would take the 2nd photo in this example. And the end result photo would be this sweet entry by myself.

hyde park in the summer

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Enclosures, Links and mobile clubbing

people dancing in a club

Paul sent this around the office today. Its a link for the London pillow fight club, a take on fight club I'm assuming. But what I found more interesting was the mobile clubbing site. Bit like the ARGs, I've always heard about mobile clubbing but never really looked into it with any depth. Might have to give it a go one day soon.

In blojsom theres 4 types of content syndication available to you, RSS 0.91, RDF 1.0, RSS 2.0 and ATOM 0.3. Well I've got rid of the RSS 0.91 icons and prefer people grab the others. But realisticly its all the same content at the moment. However I'm going to start experiementing with Enclosures in the RSS 2.0 feed. It relates back to some thinking earlier. At the same time I'm thinking of trying out Greg G's idea of using the Link element in ATOM to do the same. The first piece of content I'm considering adding is related pictures based on not the title but metadata which I'm going to add to every blog entry in the near future. So if theres metadata and the flavor is RSS 2.0 or ATOM it will add an enclosure to pull in a picture from Flickr. For example on this post I've added metadata dance (meta-keyword=dance). Which when searched in flickr will generate this page. So I will grab a random one and attach it as a image file. What would be better is if I could filter by cc only licenced photos. Shame Open photo doesnt have a better system behind it. I'm also considering putting cocoon somewhere in the middle of the process so I can use xsl to transform content rather than using vm templates. One of the things which has made me think about this area more is this posted by doc searls.

By the way this would be the search string which would be generated – http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-nc-sa-2.0/tags/dance and I would take a random photo in this example. And the end result photo would be this sweet photo. Now I just need to work out how to do this using the webservice API's and without transforming html pages.


At Ponana in Edinburgh, playing with the strobe light

Been explorering RSS 1.0 (RDF) spec for the ability to add extra content. Looks like it can be done easily.

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The Evil Anime giraffe

After the axon run around in piccadilly yesterday evening, most of us went to to eat. So we got to know each other alot better. Despite the terriable service in Deep Pan pizza we had a good time. And I got speaking to Flidget Jerome. Well theres a lot more to Flidget, than meets the eye. But one of the most interesting facts about her, is shes a very good Anime artist.

The Lady of the Silences, Patron of Those who have Sold, Traded, Lost or Otherwised Misplaced Their Souls
You can find more at her website evilgiraffe.

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