Why videoblogging can be great for deaf people
This was a surprise for me: "I am so excited about the idea of videoblogs being utilized by a deaf community. As a child I had several deaf or hearing impaired friends ...sign language is visual (it is extremely expressive and can be poetic like dance) and there's meaning conveyed in the physicality of this language - just like a verbal one- that cannot be conveyed in text."
Follow up: it turns out some deaf people, even though they can see and read, find written language somewhat hard because they lack auditor memory. So for deaf people videoblogging, if easy enough, could be huge.
WFP
As you might know, there's a genocide going on in Sudan. If you're rich by international standards (hint: if you live in the US you probably are), here you can donate some $$ that might make some difference. 20$. Go on.
Videoblogging and the co-construction of users and technology.
When Mica goes to work or visits friends in Manhattan, she takes a small digital videocamera, and shoots video of anything that captures her attention. At night, she makes little movies and puts them on her Typepad blog. Mica is a videoblogger.
Videoblogging isn't made easy for Mica though. After lots of practice it still takes her a while to post an entry. Most videobloggers use 3 or 4 different programs to create a post. There are bandwidth concerns, and discussions about people linking to video. Because it's complex, not many people post regular videoblog entries. Videoblogging prety much stands where the web was in 1996, despite the fact that the basic technical capabilities have been available for years.
When a lot of different elements interlock in complex way to form a system, a useful way of untangling the complexities of the system is to think of it as an ecology. In an ecology, elements depend on each other. The ecology of videoblogging is a complex one, and there are many, interlocked reasons why videoblogging hasn't taken off in a big way yet. Bandwidth limits videoblogging as much or more as the lack of simple tools does. The lack of an audience is a problem, as is the lack of examples and easy viewing tools.
Bandwidth, authoring tools, audience, viewing tools, specialized hosting services, language and the lack of standards are all parts of the videoblogging ecology. The challenge is to stimulate the development of the crucial parts of the ecology, after which the other parts will fall in place. This is called a tipping point - videoblogging will not become popular slowly, it will become popular suddenly. As a comparison, on Plasticbag.org there was a good writeup recently of the audioblogging ecology. The videoblogging ecology is still in an even earlier stage. But things are happening.
Linking is a crucial part of videoblogging. Videos suck up attention (although less so than audio - the images seem to make it easier to watch while thinking about something else, bringing back your attention when needed). It's hard to skip parts you're not interested in. It's hard to scan (although fast forward kinda works). Its hard to discuss a specific part of a video if you can't link.
The technology of linking into video has been around for years, but was always neglected. For a while now, Jon Udell, realizing the importance of linking to stimulate conversations, has been reverse-engineering linking into video and audio. He's had some success: now, if you're listening to audio at the Gilmore Gang, there is a little tool that makes it easy to link to a certain point within the audio, so you can comment on it. Example: "Jon continues to explain the need for random-access players and supporting URLs [clip] and standards and why he thinks players will ultimately become authoring tools." Even better: you don't need a streaming server to provide this functionality: a simple HTTP server can do this. Linking to a point within a video stream is a bit more complex (with the different formats and all), but it can be done. Here's a technical writeup, and here's an experimental web-based tool that lets you link to a point within a Realplayer video.
Bandwidth is a major challenge. Videofiles are large, so bandwidth can become a problem. Getting hit with bandwidth charges (most hosts charge about US$1 per additional Gig) is no fun. Video on the web will never scale the way television scales: with TV, it doesn't matter how big the audience is. That's a constraint, but constraints are not necessarily bad. We just have to stop thinking of videoblogging as a copy of what movies or television is doing. We can't copy them, and we shouldn't.
Meanwhile, we still need to be able to control bandwidth. It shouldn't be too hard, but just as linking within a media stream, no easy open source product seems to exist. I've been thinking about using Apache logs to log bandwidth usage, and then using PHP (or your favourite language) to dynamically serve a different size videofiles (using SMIL) depending on how much bandwidth is left. Ideas are welcome. Maybe Apache's mod_throttle is another part of the solution?
Once we get the bandwidht managing problem under control, pretty much any old host can be used. We don't really need streaming servers and all that.
Peer to peer is another partial solution for the bandwidth problem. It lets you share large files without eating up your server bandwidth. BitTorrent is a P2P system that lets you distribute small files that, when a user clicks on a link, download movies from other people - not from your server. So you don't get charged for bandwidth. BitTorrent is still a geeks game though. Luckily a new project called BattleTorrent is trying to change that.
RSS enclosures are a part of RSS that lets you embed bittorrent files in your newsfeed. This means that someone can subscribe to your newsfeed and, if they want, automatically start downloading video overnight so it's ready for them in the morning. Adam Curry has been experimenting with this a lot. Personal TV channels, a term coined by David Winer.
Video formats and players are a confusing mess as well (Real, Quicktime and Windows Media, and the open source folks), but the reality is: we can all see most of the stuff out there, if we have broadband. For me, this is less of an issue, and certainly not an element of the ecology that can be easily fixed.
The first person I ever heard actually utter the words "participatory journalism" was Drazen Pantic ("Politics happens on the couch"). I actually have it on video. I met Drazen Pantic for the first time in a gallery in Soho while talking about videoblogging. The dream is this: if people all over the world have a media outlet, they can share a lot of political information. Drazen is working on a project to do just that, called Open4all.info. The possibilities of videoblogging to make a social and political difference are there. Stuart Hughes is a BBC journalist, and his videoblog gives a whole new perspective to the news. Steve Garfield videoblogged the DNC convention. Talk to US invites people from all over the world to send in 30 second video messages to talk to the people in the US. Remember the revolution will not be televised? It might be videoblogged. If you like books, check out Joe Trippi 's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Be the media!
The co-construction of users and technology.
Here's the point I'm trying to make with this article. When Robert Fulton invented the steamboat in 1807, he didn't just solve the problem of getting a steam engine to propel his boat. The technical pieces of the puzzle had been around for a while. He also solved a legal problem by negotiating with the New York state legislature as to what speed was required for his steamboat. He knew that his low-pressure boat would have limited speed, so he convinced the legislature to modify the terms under which he would be awarded a monopoly for transportation on the Hudson River. (p. 176 Shaping Technology, Building Society.)
The videoblogging challenge is both technical and social. Not separately technical and social, the two are intimately connected. You cannot develop the technology without developing the community.
Here's what's important: the dream of IP video and audio empowering users doesn't have to happen. It's not a technologically necessecary outcome. That's the mistake many of us geeks make - believing that technology drives history. Every little experiment we do is a small step on the co-creation of users and technology, and the values we put in those experiments will continue to reverberate for years. Empowering people. Simple technology. No high production values. Back and forth community video. Moments and conversations. Getting to know each other.
When Joho the Blog blogged a video reply to Charles Cooper's article at CNET, as an experiment, not everyone agreed on the effectiveness of that approach. Clearly, we're still figuring out the language of videoblogging. This is a time of experimenting, of pioneers. Here they are: Mica Scalin (posts a LOT), Steve Garfield (quickly becoming the poster boy for videoblogging), Steve's mom, The Dane, Charlene, Jay Dedman (pushing videoblogging into the mainstream - here's a long videointerview with him), Shannon, Adrian Miles (MIT experiments), Tim Hall, Eric Rice, Peter Van Dijck, Chris (the human dog), Juston Johnson (started and runs vidblogs.com, a collection of videoblogs ), Stuart Hughes (a BBC journalist and videoblogger), Olsen (proving the very real connection between videoblogging and karaoke), Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen (giving an academic perspective), Daily Experience (trying to be a daily videoblog), video-link (a Japanese videoblog), disinfotainment (streaming videoblog by Charles Eicher with commentary on Japanese and US media), videoblog.tv. Then there are collective video blogs: Tropism (an arty collective in the Nederlanths), vidblogs.com. I am forgetting some here... You also may want to check out unmediated.org, an excellent collective blog tracking the tools that decentralize the media, http://demandmedia.net, found video from all over the web, Videoblogging.info, a new site that wants to aggregate videoblogs. I probably forgot a few. Videoblogging is getting lots of attention in the press as well. If you'd rather read a (free) book: Dan Gillmor 's We the Media is a good start, or buy Joe Trippi 's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
Finally, How users matter is a great (social science) book relevant to the title of this article - the co-construction of users and technology. A must read.
(And then I haven't even mentioned moblogging video with cellphones.)
Digital Democracy Teach-In 2004
I'm listening to some audio, and suddenly I get Jon's obsession with quoting segments. A conference generates, say, 100 hours of audio. If you can't navigate that easily, can't link to pieces of it, it's not as useful and it won't support conversations as much.
Using logs to get size of served video
I am playing around with a way to dynamically serve higher optimized (ie. smaller) video files if I get close to my bandwidth limit, so that I won't get hit with extra bandwidth charges. All this to make videoblogging more feasible.
Now, I can generate SMIL from PHP - SMIL is just an XML text file. The SMIL points to the movie file. I can save SMIL as a .mov file, which just gets picked up by Quicktime as a normal .mov file. So that lets me (PHP) decide which movie file to show (of, say, 3 versions I have stored, from small to large), IF PHP knows how much bandwidth the files have been using.
In come Apache server logs. With code like this in my httpd.conf file:
LogFormat "%U %B" video
CustomLog logs/videosize video
I can generate a logfile like this, which can then be parsed (by PHP or something else) for size of served movie files:
/video/davewinerwiener.mov 0
/video/davewinerwiener.mov 444802
The first line is when I access a movie file in the browser that's locally cached. The second line shows the size of the movie file served. Bingo.
Still, the logfile would grow very large very quickly. It would be nice to ONLY show .mov files, or only show files from a certain directory, instead of all the files accessed on our server. Scales better. I couldn't find a way of doing that though. There doesn't seem to be an appropriate setting in Apache's mod_log_config, although you can do conditionals with it, so there's some hope. Any ideas would be very welcome!
Forget the bloggers, it's the vloggers showing the way on the internet
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Forget the bloggers, it's the vloggers showing the way on the internet: "He slipped into the now ubiquitous - even, he says, in Peruvian one-horse towns - internet cafe, got out his digital video camera and began uploading the tales of his travels on to his website back in the Netherlands. Then, each week, the rest of the world was free to watch his travel diary."
For some reason, videoblogging seems to speak to the imagination of the journos. Good stories, somehow. Or maybe it's just summer. Cool anyway.
Prime Time Hpermedia, te first new column for OReilly by John Udell. A must read for videobloggers.
Traveling and storing digital pictures
If you go travel for any serious amount of time, and take a lot of digital pictures, you need to figure out a way to store all that goodness. Uploading to a site is not a practical option (too much data, and you don't want to spend your days sitting in an internet cafe waiting for the upload to finish). You basically have 3 options: a portable harddrive, a portable CD burner, or buying lots of memory cards.
When I went for two weeks to Colombia, I took my 256M memory card, and that was fine. I put the settings to make medium size pictures, and didn't make too many movies. This time I'm planning on spending 6 weeks in India, so I need another solution. I want to feel as if I can take as many pictures and movies a day as I like. Memory cards do drop in price - a 256M SD card is now less than US$50 - but the approach doesn't scale if you plan to travel a lot.
This Thorntree thread discusses most options. DPReview.com has a list of options.
Portable CD recorders.
Many of these double as DVD players and such, but I'm not interested in those features. The biggest problem seems to be availability in the US.
The Nixvue Vizor (straight out of Startrek) looks, um, interesting, but doesn't seem to be for sale anywhere.
(Yes, they're bulky, these portable CD burners. But less bulky than, say, a guidebook.)
The EZDigiMagic is for sale for US$300 but out of stock, oh wait, seems to be available for US$259. Gets good reviews (scroll down). Seems like a decent option.
The most recommended portable CD writer seems to be the JOBO CP 200 Apacer Disc Steno, currentl at US$250. Here's a good, real life traveling review. The writer recommends having 2 storage options while travelling (not a bad idea but expensive) - he carried a CD burner AND a portable harddrive.
The Carry Fotobar stands out because it burns to DVD as well as to CD, but again, seems hard to find in the US. Here: "It can be found at 3C outlets, where the device is sold in the US$249 to US$269 range." Carry's site.
Harddrives.
Harddrives are less of a contender for me because the harddrives they use are pretty much laptop harddrives and these often give problems. A CD with pictures won't lock up on you as a harddrive might, loosing you everything (it might break but you can just send a copy home). So I haven't listed many options here.
The coolest option, if you have one of the newer iPods, is the Belkin iPod Media Reader. It's about US$80, and lets you save data from your media cards on your iPod. Funky, but be careful traveling with iPods. They're very stealable. Also, reviews seem to indicate the transfers are so slow that your iPods battery might run out before you've transferred all your pictures.
The FlashTrack is US$700 for 80 Gigs, US$400 for 20 Gigs seems one of the typical dodgy options. You need to buy an adaptor if you want to use anything else than Flash memory cards.
The big boys seem to be entering the playing field as well. Nikon has the Nikon Coolwalker is a bit expensive at US$500. Sorry for the large picture.
Not yet available.
There are also some promising options that aren't yet available.
Sony has a promising 40Gigs portable harddrive (supposed to be available in Japan now) and a portable CD writer, the Sony MCS1 PhotoVault Mini CD-R Station at US$199 at Amazon (not yet available) - it burns photos to mini CD-R (which only hold 200M) instead of the standard writable CD's.
Finally, the Delkin USB Bridge, at US$70, means you don't need a computer to get data out of your camera, but you still need storage, like a normal (not standalone) CD writer (they're cheap these days at US$75 or less). Some experimentation required, but may well be a great option.
What's your experience? Real life stories very welcome!
Anti spam
I've been using Knowspam.net for about 4 months now, and I like it muchly. I moved to Mozilla Thunderbird for my email today, and was having a problem sending email through Knowspam. A question, a speedy and correct reply (even though the problem was unusual) that fixed it. Excellent. Well worth the small yearly charge. And: I get almost no spam these days.
The system challenges people to prove they're humans before it lets email pass through to you. Most people never have to do that though (people already in your contacts, or people YOU send email to don't have to), and the others only have to do it once. Sure, one or two emails will get lost now and then, but very few. And it has stopped the thousands of spam messages I was receiving a day. Highly recommended.
We the Media
I'm skimming through the free, online version of We the Media. Not bad. One thing bothers me though: the book repeatedly states that technology is the driving force behind change. I think Dan Gilmor (like many techies) underestimates the social factor in the construction of technology.
Technology doesn't evolve by itself. Blogs didn't happen because they were a logical technology that was bound to happen. They happened in an interwined dance between users and technology, in which both shaped each other. Yes, I've been reading social science books again...
Russell Beattie Notebook - LifeBlogger!
Russell Beattie Notebook - LifeBlogger!: "how I had just downloaded the Lifeblog beta from Nokia's site and how it seemed incredibly hackable. The images are all stored in your My DocumentsNokiaLifeblog folder, the text messages are stored as plain text and the repository for all the meta data was labeled "NokiaLifeblogDatabase.db" which when opened in a text editor says quite helpfully "This file contains an SQLite 2.1 database."
Smart Mobs: City of Memory
Via Smart Mobs: "Jake Barton's City of Memory uses a map structure to locate stories about life in New York City."
BE the sysadmin?
Here's a question in the ongoing quest of starting my own company. I'm a pretty bad sysadmin, so I'd like to work together with someone good for some projects I have planned.
Have you worked together with a sysadmin on an irregular basis? I don't imagine paying someone every week - my ideas won't bring in enough $ for that. Apart from becoming one myself, what are my options? I just need someone to set up a server (nothing too complex, I could do it myself but it would take me two weeks where it would take a pro a few hours, plus I want it done properly.), and to check it now and then (hopefully rarely).
Is hoping for a working arrangement for a situation like this naive? Have others done it? Should I learn ALL skills needed to run the web based services I am working on? Any tips or experiences welcome!
Downhill Battle - Downhill Battle Labs - Battle Torrent
Battle Torrent is a combination of PHP and a script that can be installed that tries to make it really easy to upload and download BitTorrent files. Cool work.
Life without a job
One of the nice things about life without a job (where you work on your own projects or consulting), is that you can take your time to learn. When I worked for companies, things always had to be done now, and I didn't feel I could spend a day doing research on something.
Now, I'll spend a day or two on research - it's an investment. It's also lots of fun.
Counting bandwidth usage in PHP
Here's a question: is it possible, given a bunch of videofiles on your server, to keep track of bandwidth usage with PHP (+ Apache, Linux)? Maybe something like mod_throttle/3.1.2 can help?
I am thinking through different ways of dynamically generating different SMIL files (with PHP) based on how much bandwidth you've used already. The idea is that I can have movie files of different sizes on my server, and if they suddenly become popular, dynamically start serving smaller (more optimized) files, or even just some (SMIL) text saying "sorry, I'm out of bandwidth for movies this month, try again next month".
Ideas for approaches, code, examples or pointers, it's all appreciated. I'm just a beginner here, mucking around with techie stuff I should really leave well alone, trying to make videoblogging easier. Making sure you don't get hit with bandwidth costs is a big part of that.
Video blog experiments
Joho the Blog blogged a video reply to Charles Cooper's article at CNET, as an experiment.
Back posting
After I finally found the time to fix my Wordpress login problem (How I solve login problems after installation with version 1.2 ?) (being on a broadband connection at my brothers' place helped), I'm posting again. Lotsa videoblogging going on, Jay's site is a good place to check for regular links.
Steve's Mom's videoblogs
My Mom's Blog by Thoroughly Modern Millie: brilliant videoblog entry about usability of a coffeebox lid. Check it.
Fast Track
Fast Track: "ForwardTrack is a new system created by Eyebeam R&D designed to promote on-line activism. The system tracks and maps the diffusion of email forwards, political calls-to-action, and petitions. Our goal is to help people understand decentralized networks and see the power of "6 degrees of separation." ForwardTrack technology helps prove that one person can make a difference.
Millions of political messages are distributed through email, but it has been a notoriously difficult medium to measure. In 2001, Eyebeam's R&D Director Jonah Peretti, then a graduate student at MIT, had considerable difficulty tracking the spread of his Nike Sweatshop email forward. It was impossible to determine how many people received the email or exactly how it diffused."
And it will be made open source.
PlaNetwork Journal -> Anybody Can Be TV: How P2P Home Video will Challenge The Network News
Drazen Pantic (who knows what he's talking about): PlaNetwork Journal -> Anybody Can Be TV: How P2P Home Video will Challenge The Network News
MT to Wordpress redirects.
I used the following script to create a mod_rewrite file for my new Wordpress install. After running the script, the redirects look like this:
Redirect Permanent /ease/archives/001694.html http://www.poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2002/11/23/562/i-renamed-xfmlmanager-to-taxomita
Note the /562/ part. That's different from the usual Wordpress URL's.
The reason I had to write this script is that the existing scripts assume every item has a title. I have written a lot of my MT entries without title, so I can't use the http://www.poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2002/11/23/i-renamed-xfmlmanager-to-taxomita style, because it assumes no two entries on the same day have the same title. Empty titles wouldn't really work. It's not a huge problem, but I tried to solve it anyway, by setting up a URL structure that incorporates the entry ID: (in the Wordpress admin, go to Options > Permalinks and use the following code)
/archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%post_id%/%postname%
This way every entry has a unique URL, even when it doesn't have a title.
The script below isn't particularly well developed, so you'll need to know PHP to adjust it for your purposes. Enjoy.
View the script at http://www.poorbuthappy.com/ease/files/redirect.txt
There are still a few weeks left for the Boxes and Arrows Redesign Contest. Get your pencils out.
Went to see Maria Full of Grace last Saturday. It's a good movie, not all doom and nastyness, but just real people doing real things.
As someone who has lived in Colombia (and my gf who is from Colombia agrees), I can say Colombia is exactly as portrayed in the movie. My gf said the moto guy was exactly like the real moto guys she knew in Colombia.
I've shot a documentary in Colombia earlier this year, and in the beginning of the movie, I kept thinking "we have that footage!". All the scenes where shot in places we have shot or at least been to as well (Queens, NYC; the airport; Medellin Colombia, Bogota). Of course, we don't have that story, nor that acting, nor that moviemaking talent.
I donated US$50 for the Kerry campaign on the street the other day. I can't vote in the US, but US politics fascinates me more and more. Tactics are scarily refined. In Belgium, we have a multi-party state, every election 2, 3 or 4 parties work together to form the governement. Here in the US, it's one winner takes all.
SitePoint PHP Blog: "the developers behind TheyWorkForYou have published their source code on Sourceforge."
My laptop replacement system
After trying (without success) to get my laptop to play nice with my wireless card for about 10 gruelling hours, and hearing I'm getting a nice tax refund, I've decided on plan B: using my laptop replacement system.
Every few years, I buy a US$900-ish consumer laptop (using the best deal I can find), and sell it about 2 years later for about US$400. Then I buy a new one. This way, I always have a decent model, while paying very little (about US$300 a year). It's a much better strategy than buying the latest new fancy model for US$2500 and keeping it 5 years. First of all, you'd be paying more per year. And second, on average, you'll probably have a less powerfull system during those 5 years, since after 2 years my latest new laptop will be at least equally powerful to your older laptop, and after 4 years I'll have a laptop that's much more powerful than your old one.
So that's been my system, and it has worked pretty well. An additional (and not to be underestimated) benefit is that you get a fresh Windows install every 2 years. One of the biggest factors in slowing down a Windows machine is simply the amount of time you've been working on it. And there's really not much you can do about that, even with obsesive cleaning up of your computer. Installing a fresh Windows copy on a laptop yourself is an experience I can't recommend.
I don't spend too much time comparing laptops. I know I need a consumer model, I just look around for good deals (there are always a few good deals with rebates and such floating around) and then compare tech specs to check if there are no snafus. For example, on the laptop I decided on this year, you have to take out existing 128M memory cards (and pretty much throw them away) if you want to add memory. Not nice, but I can live with that.
So this year I'm selling my Compaq Presario 715US and buying a
HP Pavilion ze5730us Notebook. Pretty much the same computer, but more powerful. The harddrive is 40Gig instead of 20Gig, the processor is about twice as fast, I can install more memory (up to 1024 M RAM compared to up to 465 Meg on the Compaq) and it has built-in wireless. And a fresh XP install, of course.
Additionally, I'll sell the old laptop in Belgium instead of here in the US. Laptops are about 20-30% more expensive in Europe compared to the US.
Working for yourself with tech support?
I've spend 10 hours so far trying to get my laptop to work with a linksys wireless card. Their support is good because they have chat (I like chat support, even though it's often slow, at least you can ask questions), but we haven't been able to fix it. I'm sure someone who knows their stuff and with access to the computer could fix it in 15 minutes.
Working for yourself is great, but where do you get tech support when you need it? I'd happily pay someone to fix this, just don't know where to go. If you work for yourself, how do you deal with this? Any pointers?
I'm at the point where I'm considering buying another laptop, or re-installing XP from scratch, both way too painful for something stupid like this. Am I going to just have to deal with it and spend 10% of my time wasted trying to fix things like this?
And another videoblogger is born.
Now that I'm working on my own online service, I am the programmer, the marketing department, the usability person, the designer, the business person. I do it all. What is surprising me is how easy switching between the roles is.
I'll be programming something, then run into a problem that requires a business answer. So I go sit somewhere else, and do the business thinking. Then I sit somewhere else and do the usability sketches, and back to programming.
I didn't think it would work like this, I had kinda planned to write specs the way I usually do, then implement them. But I'm writing few specs (I am writing documentation). Bad practice? Maybe not for a team of one?
NewsForge | Open source usability is a technical problem we can solve on our own: "The reason why there is no usability data pool is that there is no data to be had. Useablilty is simply a matter of taste and choice, that's why when you ask a quesiton about useablilty all you get is opinions. Useablilty labs are like marketing labs; they are there to gather opinions from focus groups on useablility.
[...]
Asking developers to increase usability is roughly equivalent to asking them to dumb the interface down. That's a big hurdle, but one that's important to broach.
[...]
It's difficult to understand what users say, just like whales.
[...]
We need guys that do beautiful things... guys like Everaldo, though he's a designer, not a GUI expert...
[...]
There is an immediate tradeoff between useability and features.
[...]
Just how seriously should people who's basic goal in life seems to sit around whining about something rather than actually getting off their fat lazy asses and actually doing something to improve the world. I hate to break this to you so-called "Usability Experts", but Open Source wasn't created for you losers to build your so-called careers on."
And so on.
Wired News: Online Games a Massive Pain: "Electronic Arts joins a growing list of companies -- Cyan Worlds, Games Workshop, There Inc. -- that invested millions of dollars in online games, only to see disappointing sales or unfinished projects."
Google, for the first time ever, has an ad on its homepage: "Have a digital camera? Try Google's Picasa software. Free Download." I know the company is theirs, but it's still an ad.
EmptyBottle.org: Am I Angry? Do I Hate? Can I Kill?: "But butt-fucking kids while their mothers look on? While videotaping it? I'm not sure that's really in line with the 'rape, loot and pillage' modus operandi so loved and respected throughout human history. Pushing the envelope a little, that. It may not be specifically forbidden by the letter of Geneva Convention, for example, but I'm pretty sure it goes against the spirit of it."
Nokia - Nokia Lifeblog: "Nokia Lifeblog Beta 0.95 is here! Download and install Lifeblog Beta on your desktop PC and phone and start building your multimedia diary today!"
New Scientist: "After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape."
So I played around with Python for a few hours, found out you can do really nice Windows client side GUIs with it (Mac as well?) fairly easily, and that you can easily convert python scripts into standalone windows programs. Like it a lot so far.
5 minutes with Python
I know PHP, and I'm learning Python. After 5 minutes:
- it's pretty much the same as PHP, except that you don't put ; characters at the end of a command.
- and except that Python comes with a tool that lets you run programs without having to upload to a server.
- and variables don't use the $ sign in front of them.
- don't use curly brackets, instead just indent stuff
- and more little differences like that: elseif() in PHP is elif in Python. function becomes def. Variables within functions are local, not global, just like PHP.
- you have to define variables before using them. This annoys me much. And it complains when you mix different types of variables. This annoys me mucher. I don't see why this is necessary, except for making my life harder.
Going well so far - I got Hello World running in minutes.
Yesterday I spent all day writing the registration pages and error checking code (including defending against those snarkyt sql injection attacks) for my upcoming service, making it as user friendly as possible (which is much more than most registrations). I decided to use the "almost there" pattern, where, when an input error happens, the user is sent to an intermediate "almost there" page instead of being sent to the same registration page with errors highlighted, which most registration systems seem to use. I like the "almost there" approach better: the user doesn't have to actively ignore a lot of stuff they've looked at before. It goes against accepted wisdom that all input should be checked clientside before submission.
So today I'm taking a day off from this project and I'll learn Python. Python's desktop capabilities seem to make it a good fit for some of my future projects, so I'm going to spend some time getting familiar with it.
I love having my own business and deciding for myself what I'm doing with my day. I was originally going to work more on the registration script, but I didn't feel like it so I'll do one of the more fun things on my long to-do list.
A question: how easy is learning Python (with wxPython) compared to learning Visual Basic? I want to learn some programming language that lets me do desktop applications that are heavily internet connected (xml-rcp, ftp, ...). Which language should I spend my time learning?
I've been trying to include text in a SMIL movie that I save as a .mov and play in Quicktime. Including a .txt file works, but I couldn't markup (bold, italics, ...) the file. Finally I figured it out. QuickTime Text Descriptors like {plain} can be used to markup text (fonts, bold, how long to show pieces of text, ...) you want to include in a SMIL presentation for Quicktime (Quicktime doesn't do HTML markup).
Mica's latest video is a great lesson in communication technology. Check it out!
I met up in downtown Manhattan (Soho) with Jay and Drazen Pantic, a serb who helped create B-92, the radio station that was in sarejavo during the war and was the only independent voice out there, and former Yugoslavia's first internet provider.
In the video (inside) he's explaining how they had to log in remotely in their internet service and erase all user data to protect people. We talked about videoblogging and his new project dv.open4all.info which is like a bittorrent host where people can upload video (torrent files). Share the media - be the media.
One of his quotes I really liked: "Politics happens on the couch.". Which is why we need Freevo - so people can watch real-people TV from the internet on the couch, not huddled behind a monitor. He also told me about FFMPEG, an open source product that can be used to optimize video serverside.
The video is inside.