Got myself a copy of Windows media player 10. Lots more information here. And I will write a longer account once I get around to installing it. Lots of interesting information from a interview with Bill gates and Microsoft was available in digital home this month. But microsoft-watch has the highlights.
There are some screen shots of Windows media player 10 here
Controlling two different os machines from one input
I've been downloading the screensavers episodes from bit torrent recently, then watching them on my ipaq into work. Anyway I was watching this episode and came across Sarah's Download of the day – Synergy.
I think this animation explains it all.
I cant wait to see it working on my Windows XP Pro workstation and GNU/Linux Debian test box. Will have to take a photo because my monitors are on different sides of the desk.
Social software and google’s Orkut
So I've now signed up to Orkut.com from google.com. As I'm interested in how it compares to Wallop and Friendster. Gareth was messing with it and showed us that half of the more vocal members of the BBC new media are already on there. Actually looking at it, I did a search for BBC and got tons of groups sorry communities. Slaves of BBCi is where the newmedia people hangout. Owned by Tom coats of plasticbag
Generally it seems ok, tons and tons of questions could be answered, but I opted for a more secretive approch, only giving up name, work number, date of birth and city. Some of the drop downs ignoyed me slightly. For example – am I african american? I don't bloddy think so! Black yes not African or American! Typical American view. But also all the towns and stuff can only be filled in if you live in America. At least Meetup.com has a more balanced view of the world. Talking of which I listened to Scott Heiferman from meetup.com talk about it on Social Computing Symposium – Keynote: New Dynamics of Using Online to go Offline. Interesting the idea and the risks taken.
Back to Orkut a bit, the interface is yuk! Really need a way to allow you to upload your own stylesheet or pick a style?
Oh yeah my username is cubicgarden by the way, if you want to add me as a friend…
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.
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.
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
Pixel Diva = Ann McMeekin
Everyone laughed at me when I said I read the blog of a women called Pixel Diva who works on BBC's Radio 4's women's hour. I knew she was'nt making it up…
Clogging up the web with RSS
Wired are running a feature about RSS readers clogging up the web.
This kind of ties to my cutting rss short.
TeledyN's Murphy runs one of the most popular open-source Linux sites (which he started in 1994). He was one of the first to offer an RSS feed in 1999 when Netscape introduced the format. By late last year, Murphy's website would run out of bandwidth by 8 p.m.
Murphy's problems arose because he, like many bloggers, included most of his site's front page, including graphics, in the RSS feed, allowing users to read his entries in whole without visiting his website.
In contrast, most news sites, including Wired News, want to bring readers to their websites, so they serve up only a headline or a couple of sentences along with a link to the full story.
I think the feature is valid but blog software should include something like the conditional get helps with the badly written rss readers.
Social Computing Symposium
Lunch time at the BBC and I'm still buzzing thinking about the possible outcomes of the moblogging plug-in in Blojsom 2.14. I posted a comment on blojsom blog about the ability to now blog anywhere there is a net connection, which for me is anywhere. Even abroad because I've got international GPRS roaming.
Anyway one of the things which happened when I started the plug-in was, Blojsom picked out a email which happened to be one I sent to myself in a BBC. I meant to keep it as a copy and the blog picked it up. Now think about it one second, a blog which picks up things you want to keep? (I keep forgetting email is the leader in social technology by the way) And imagine if you could do the same for instant messager too?
A blog which stores useful things through out the day without actually having to send a post? Nice, maybe not on my main blog but for example on the bookmarks blog will be useful. If you could add metadata too we would be very cool.
I've also been thinking about what happens when Blojsom can respond back to you? Its one of those things I wanted in blojsim for a while. I know Blojsom can send email but I've disabled it and I don’t really know why its there. Anyway, I'm thinking out loud…
Been watching Social Computing Symposium. And thinking about social networking and its software, social technologies like email, text, im, blogs, wikis, etc. E invite sounds interesting never come across it before. Would you call blogs and wikis lightweight authoring?
Interesting enough, the BBC try and encourage people to use im to communicate through-out the buildings. Unfortually there using Microsoft MSN messager so no interoperability with Ravensbournes Jabber server will be available in short term.