Month: March 2008

I’m going to Manchester

Manchester

So as some people might have guessed I'm moving from London to Manchester. This might be quite a shock for some but after the messy divorice and the sale of the house, I thought again about the BBC's offer to help staff move to Manchester early. Clean break from the expensive city which I started to think of as home.

I went up to Manchester about 2 weeks ago to see what it was like and except for a little abuse about being from the south it wasn't bad at all. What struck me about Manchester was the buildings. There are tons of modern flats covering most of the central area of Manchester city centre and there really reasonable in price because there are so many of them. I went for a viewing of a range of flats just off oxford road/street and was shocked to find high ceilings, lots of space and a great view. Not only that, but I would have been 1min walk from both BBC Manchester and Oxford road train station. This type accommendation in London would set you back a least one grand and a bit every month. But in Manchester its less that 600 pounds a month.
I was also suprised at how modern everything was. Like the picture, everythings clean stone and glass in the centre.

There are some serious business reasons to go up to Manchester too. A lot of people feel the BBC is too London centric. And Backstage also gets a lot of flack for running most of the events in London including Over the Air. Well not any more, now the centre of Backstage will be Manchester and London 2nd. I'm hoping to unite a North and South a little better through the work at backstage. Yes there is a divide but I don't think its about trying to out do London, its about playing to your strenghts. As Adrian McEwen wrote there is a fear that running events in the north will not generate much interest. Well there are events planned which will change this. The success of BarCampManchester and the upcoming Think Digital conference alongside BarCampNewcastle, should be a true idicator that the North is important and new interesting events can be successful. (Oh did I mention Backstage is sponsoring and supporting the last two?)
.

Anyway back to moving. So I don't know the exact date yet, it depends on when I find a flat I like in Manchester I guess. But the house I'm living in right now has sold and so at some point soon, there will be a complition date which means I will have to move before that date. Everything squared off at work, so I can move reasonably quickly without too much distruption.
Obviously I will be back and forth between London and Manchester but I do want to throw a large scale party in London at some point to say bye to friends. This may co-inside with a large london geekdinner I've been planning on Saturday 26th April. So please try and keep that date clear if possible. Hey I may even drink that night…

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The world’s 50 most powerful blogs – who cares?

I was talking to Sarah our friendly PR woman the other day about all this stuff to do with iPlayer, when I spotted a print out titled The world's 50 most powerful blogs. I launched into a rant about how full of crap these lists are. Just like the Technorati top 100, etc. the Blogosphere has finally grown up and dropped the need for such lists, but mainstream media still thrive on this type of stuff. I mean what the hell does powerful really mean anyway? Are we talking power in numbers of people, reach, hits, advertising revenue, influence or what? Its stupid and we're better off without these popularity contests. I mean how can you compare Engadget to Boingboing? There very different just like the huge long tail of the blogosphere (yes I hate the term too). Its all about personal preference and we're fools if we forget this. Subscribe to what you like, not whats popular. Rant over…

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Send to Flickr

Bahi sent around the call for testers a while ago and I thought actually Kflickr's and fspot's been ok but both very bloated for a simple uploader to flickr. So I thought I'd give send to flickr a try.

It does work as shown above but I've already got a few bits of feedback already.

  • The icon on the gnome desktop does not scale to a size bigger that 32×32 it seems. It needs a scalable icon.
  • There's no ability to rename the file names or set collections.
  • I assume proxy support is done via gnome?
  • It would be nice to have some little notification when its finished uploading or be able to have the uploading progress bar as a notification
  • The whole application seems to disappear once the upload is finished. Need some confirmation of upload.
  • Good call on the right click option.

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Signup now for Over the Air

Over the Air banner

You can now sign-up for Over the Air, the 48 hour development event happening in Imperial College with MobileMonday and supported by the BBC. There are other sponsors to be announced very soon…

The last few months have been pretty crazy in the mobile world. The iPhone has caught many peoples imagination running. Its sold ok in the uk but not that well. However its certainly shaken up the mobile makers and operators. But the one to watch has to be Android which seems to be the most wanted device of 2008 (next to the pacemaker). It promises so much and seems to be so perfect to people like myself who have been cursing there windows mobile phones. The devices are powerful but the software and operating system although not bad, just felt under powered. So something like Android would be amazing. But it gets even better in the form of truly open handsets such as the Openmoko

On top of these two changes to the mobile world, the UK mobile operators have all announced and launched all you can eat data plans which people can actually afford. These changes plus HSDPA/HSUPA (3.5g) dongles along side almost ubiquitous wireless across most cities. Finally means you can be online all the time and not at a stupid jaw dropping price.

Its not hard to see why I think having a hackday style event made a lot of sense. All these things are now within the reach of developers and almost designers. Its not just mobile too, its also wireless devices. At Hackday, the Nabaztags counted for 3 of the hacks. I'm sure there will be more and people may even experiement with the Chumby and other weird and wonderful devices.

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Within a day it was streaming to VLC…

Iplayer content in Mpeg4 streams

To Clairfy, this is my view not those of my employer. I am not suggesting that breaking BBC DRM or systems is good. But in this endless war on DRM I have blogged whats going on.

I'm wondering how long it will take for BBC iplayer content destined for the iPhone, to appear on peoples desktops. And I'm now wondering about the Xbox Media Centre, The Wii, The PSP, etc? My guess, because of the weekend 2-4 days. All the details are here… This is another example of how hyper clever and passionate the backstage community really are. I just wish it didn't involve downloading the file (Seems there might have been a problem with the servers?). Lets get it streaming and make them into legal services (aka don't break, GeoIP or Streaming) which I can promote to the managers as positive examples of opening content.

The BBC have just launched a version of their iPlayer that works with the iPhone (and iPod Touch). Instead of streaming Flash, it streams an MP4… but they don't let non-iPhone users know it's an option. So, I used the User Agent Switcher to set Firefox to claim to be an iPhone, and in place of the normal Flash playback doofer, I got a Quicktime one instead… and nothing much happened. It turns out it's because it won't actually stream, it wants to download the whole thing. That's no problem though, I get 600kb/sec downloads at work =)

So, I got out Firebug and found the stream; then copied and pasted it into the address bar, and it started downloading to play in Firefox again. Not what I wanted – so I went to Save Page As… and saved the MP4 file. And then realised that I was actually, at this point, trying to download it three times (the original iPlayer window, the new QuickTime-only tab and the download) so I closed everything else, and watched it download the mp4 at the aforementioned 600kb/sec.

Once finished, I knew it had worked – hovering the pointer over the file in Windows Explorer showed its dimensions (480×272), and moments later an entirely randomly chosen programme was playing in VLC.

So, who fancies cobbling together some code to automate this, to do what the BBC has failed to do all along – make a reasonable quality iPlayer download service for platforms other than Windows, which lacks DRM? 

So its now Monday morning and the Backstage list has been on fire over the weekend. Not only is there a fully usable Xbox Media Centre script which allows you to watch iplayer content but Matthew's been busy and updated his iplayer related prototypes. Finally also there is a very clear guide to getting it working using any Gnu/linux system. Since the Mpeg4 streams/downloads went live, people on the list have been asking why it doesn't stream correctly? People like Andy Halsall
are asking how this all fits in with the DRM versions which have launched on Windows and is coming to the Mac? Also can they really use these streams?

So if the BBC are entitled to distribute this material DRM free for the
iPhone, why are they not providing it for other platforms? I'm sure
Mac/Linux/Windows/$other users would quite like DRM free, non-expiring media.

In addition, I have to wonder about the legality of ripping the BBC's iPlayer
streams in the manner described in Matt's how-to, it works, and works well
(or at least it did at around 18:00 today), the end result would be ideal for
many people in a variety of circumstances.

Then the whole thing got boingboinged…

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Finally a dance download store I like

So I finally bought some tunes legally for the first time in a long time. I checked out a service called Audiojelly.com which has a huge back story and did a quick scan through my Tunes to get list and picked up quite a few of them. Obviously all 320k Mpeg3's with no DRM. In the end I bought…

  • apologies (original mix)conrad s
  • cause you know (nic chagall remix) markus schulz feat. departure
  • frozen (original mix) dogzilla
  • heaven scent (greg downey remix)bedrock
  • how long? (original mix)aly & fila vs. fkn feat. jahala
  • in the dark (tiesto trance mix) tiesto
  • industry (original mix)the green martian
  • kalopsia (monogato's filth remix) the blizzard
  • lost in moonshine infinity (original mix) planisphere
  • s.o.s. (message in a bottle) (sander van doorn remix) filterfunk
  • the fall (richard durand remix) way out west

I found Audiojelly really simple and quick to add and buy tracks. They also seemed to do everything correctly, for example I added loads of tunes into my playlist before even signing up. I only needed to signup when I wanted to buy them and even then everything was smooth. The price of the songs isn't as cheap as elsewhere but for dance music they seem to have a wide selection. Maybe not as many as beatport but its not as painful to use as beatport. The only bit of Flash on the page was the playlist and that worked well the rest of the site. You can do stuff like embed, bookmark and even send a chunk to a friend for their approval or something.

I think I'm going to get more into mixing. I've checked out a couple other dj applications for ubuntu but its a area which is in need of much more voices and effort. I would like to think my pacemaker will do away with the need for switching back to Windows to run Virtual DJ but it looks a long way off at the moment. I don't talk to me about virtualisation, it works but that split second difference is killer when mixing live.

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Dress my head, what kind of hat should I be wearing?

Kangol Hat

So I've had my Kangol hat for something like I believe 11-13 years and its actually getting to the point where I should really replace it but I don't know what with.

So the obvious choice would be the exact same hat but actually they don't do my hat any more and have not done so for the last ten years, which kind of sucks. So what about another Kangol? Well to be honest the styles are not very appealing. Its either a grandad hat (also known as a flat cap?), normal hat or some variation on a skull cap. My current hat is a cross between a normal hat, baseball cap and skull cap. It kind of sits on the very top of my head so you can clearly see my forehead. This feels more comfitable that the skull cap style stuff you see most people wearing. The Grandad hats do look pretty good on someone like Samuel L Jackson but look wrong on someone a little more rounded like myself. Normal baseball caps are very wrong on myself too although the visor versions of the baseball caps are not so bad, but its rare you see them around now plus I'm going to look like a dick wearing a visor in the rain or snow (who knows I could be in Manchester)

So come on people, what should I be wearing?

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BarCampManchesterUK

Werewolf in BarCampManchesterUK

So I went to BarCampManchesterUK yesterday, it was good but very different from what I'd had expected. The venue (Manchester evening news?) was good except the cooling systems were broken so each room became hotter and hotter during the day. On the last session, I stuck in Werewolf because it was obvious we weren't going to play it otherwise and we found another space to play in just above reception because I knew the rooms were far too uncomfitable to play in. In total there were 4 actual rooms and a couple of spaces to sit and chat. This was good because, people started milling around and chatting later in the day, and there was a clear distance from the rooms.

The sessions were quite web developer/design led through-out the day, I started the day off at a talk about voice on the web which I wasn't totally sure of, my thoughts were confirmed when the presenters mac died twice while trying to make a call home using a google gadget. He did in the end get it working but even then it didn't work as expected. The next session I did about Data Portability which I was really suprised very few people had heard about (yep more work needed to spread the word it would seem). I used pretty much the same slides as Thursday. What was suprising was the talk after mine which was about the same subject but from a different persepective. The guy was trying to hack into facebook and social networking sites his own content from his own server. We had quite a discussion about the fact he was doing something in between the truly decentralised social networks and the data portability group aims of getting the main players to play nicely with users data. I might have come across quite negative that session but I did say he should maybe put his efforts into one or the other. Anyway we had a chat afterwards and everythings cool. The other noteworthy session was the northpack session. They seem to be a a group of three guys who are all about promoting the north of england. They had built a web application to pull in rss feeds and upcoming events and display them for all to see (I guess Feedjack or Planet could do the same). It was good and something we in London have been talking about for years but never actually done. So anyway I started asking them if they had thought about allowing the rest of the country to use their web application? But i think that got turned into a debate about the south north divide.

Northpack guys

Anyway, I thought we got everything sorted till at the after party at this great place called Ra!n (very apt because its been raining since I got to Manchester) when a woman called Jennifer slightly drunk, tells me exactly what she thinks of the south and the BBCs move to Manchester. Unfortueally, I never got a real chance to respond because she slipped and fell (not my doing) and we called her a cab to go home.

So BarCampManchester was good and I met lots of good people and if the rooms were not so hot, it was run over 2 days and wifi actually worked it would have be great. I was however a little ruffled about the real strong tension about the south.

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