Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Dan's usually wearing a pretty cool hat, so I posed for a shot with his hat. What do you all think? I admit its not the best picture and it was taken at BarCampBrighton2 after 3 hours of sleep and a ton of Redbull. I think when I'm wearing a shirt instead of tshirt it will work better.
Wow what a difference…. I only just found out Dopplr now supports Carbon Footprint estimations via the AMEE. Very cool feature and good to see people doing worth while parnerships.
Technorati Tags: carbonfoorprint, carbon, backnetwork
One of my proposals for Xtech 2008 was accepted. I submitted two, one around APML and the other around Data Portability. As expected the Data Portability one got dropped, I guess because its maybe a little light and fluffy for a conference like Xtech. So I'll be talking about APML, which hopefully will be up to version 1.0. I'll be covering both the actual XML format but also the practical uses and services which have sprung up since APML.
The attention economy was talked about at the end of 06 to death. Through all the hype, a couple of guys from down-under started to make sense of attention and proposed APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language).Unfortunately little is known about APML and there is a lot of mis-information on APML. As one of the working group members I will run through what it is, its purpose and why its important.
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?)
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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…
Technorati Tags: manchester, london, north, south, barcamp
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…
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.
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.
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…
Sad news, Whitefield Fishponds Community school is being torn down and rebuilt as a community college. Theres a reunion this Saturday, but I can't make it due to other commitments at the opposite side of the country. Its a shame because I would have made a special trip to see it one last time.
Technorati Tags: whitefield, school
