Now for a first – 3G Moblogging. While it almost seems a shame to
merely send text over a 384Kbps link, there will be much more to
follow. On second thoughts, it’s about right – my link from an
Edinburgh-Glasgow train has just reverted to GPRS and 44Kbps (with a
following wind): Orange claim 70% UK population coverage for 3G, an
utterly weasel measure for a mobile service – the word “mobile” being
non-trivial in the context, which probably equates to about 20%
geographical cover at (say) 500m resolution. So, ’tis early days yet,
although the unreliability of UK GSM networks after a dozen years
does not bode well.
Richard
Archives
As most of my work is invention, organisation and strategy, I don’t do a lot of tech work these days but I’ve been running this blog for fifteen years, so the archived tech, news and other ramblings are archived here.
Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better
In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, when the pigs take over the farm, and set up their workers’ paradise, the mantra of the revolution, repeated ad infinitum by a Greek chorus of bleating sheep, is “Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good”. Which pretty much sums up the level of debate we’ve had in the camps of the Motorola/Macintosh and Intel/Microsoft alliances for the last two decades. It’s also a war that’s been fought on two fronts – from the mud-bogged trenches of the Mac/Windows jihadists to the free-flowing desert warfare of the Intel/Motorola skirmishes. And, as any general will tell you, a war fought on two fronts is bloody hard work, with the principal sufferers along the way being the confused and shell-shocked civilian population.
But one part of that war is heading for a conclusion: Apple is switching to Intel. Let me say that again: Apple. Is. Switching. To. Intel. It’s like watching Martin Luther walk up to the church door in Wittenberg and nail a piece of paper to the door only to find that, rather than the 95 Theses of Contention, it’s an advert for a lap-dancing club. So it’s probably time for a little reflection, not to mention eating of crow. I’ll have ketchup with mine…
Mopodcasting and Other Gratuitousness
Language evolves. New words arise to meet changing needs, old ones are adapted or discarded along the way, and the faster the change in the area of need, the faster new words arise. And that’s before we get into arguments over functionality illiteracy and laziness being used as an excuse to mangle the language. No really, let’s not. Of course the technology/media/content industry is about the planet’s prime culprit here – if a techie Rip van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1985 and had just come to, he or she would be somewhere twixt boggled and brainfried. But at least ForTran‘s still around…
This time it started with “blogging”, a contracted conflation (contraflation?) of “web logging”, itself a verbification of something many of us had been doing for years, quite happily and without feeling the need for the naming of names – the doing of things being more important. In essence though, “blogging” is the creation of dynamically updated web site content through the medium of an automated content management system. It’s perception ranges from being the reinvention of journalism in a post-post-literate society to a vanity publishing tool for the geek-at-heart. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive. What it has done is to create a massive and large accessible resource of information and opinion, plus mechanisms for its distribution and connection, which contains essential lessons for organisations in today’s emergent and adaptive environments. Polemic over for the moment and back to the -oggness of things:
Mopodcasting by GPRS
Now here’s something slightly more sophisticated: I’ve made a voice
recording from deep in the forest on my PDA (in this case a Palm),
combined it in an e-mail with a picture from my camera phone
(transferred to the PDA by Bluetooth) and forwarded it as an e-mail by
GPRS to the moblogging server. This has posted the picture and the
audio file to the web site and created a podcast feed for the audio
file only.
<img src="/images/attach_sound.gif" alt='‘ border=”0″ />
Podcasting
Any media audio files embedded in a Movable Type Entry are formatted by the vServer as podcasts, so that any podcast-aware client can download the content directly to an iPod via iTunes or to any other audio player.
Download the test file.
And another
Yet another, this time with the enclosure tag hard-coded
Demonstration of Gallery Integration
The vServer platform includes the ability to create, manage and display photogalleries. We use the Gallery package from Menalto Software.
This can work as a standalone package or can be used for image management, with the galleries created then being integrated with Movable Type, using the MTPhotoGallery Plugin by Brandon Fuller. This works simply by placing the name of the gallery folder in the keyword field, with [] around it, thusly: [Kenya05].
Creative Commons reaches the UK
At a wine and conversation-fuelled bash at The October Gallery in London’s Holborn last night, the Creative Commons licenses for England and Wales were launched. These are a set of legally-enforceable licenses for digital content that allow the originator to specify their requirements for attribution and to place limits on consequential use of their content. If you believe as I do, that the currency of knowledge is attribution, then this model of encouraging distribution and meme-building without losing that acknowledgement is both flexible and necessary.
Now Ain’t That Something…
Last night, and a mere twenty years after its original release, the Twentieth Anniversary edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy took the impressively heavy 2005 BAFTA Interactive award for Online Entertainment. For a computer game – a genre reknowned for having a shelf life of weeks rather than years, this is a unique achievement. It’s also a tribute to the principle that intelligent and engaging entertainment is timeless, no matter what the medium, and to the imagination, wit and humour of its authors. So congratulations are very much in order to the memory of Douglas Adams, to Steve Meretzky and to the BBC, Sean Sollé, Shimon Young and Rod Lord, who between them created the Twentieth Anniversary edition. The award itself is lovingly photographed here in the exotic surroundings of a Holborn Pizza restaurant, whose staff created an impromptu homage to the occasion by taking 7.5 million years to serve dinner.
Last Chance to See… …Just a bit more
<img src="files/dna/0330320025.02.MZZZZZZZ.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Book cover” />
The Third Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture, in celebration of the life and universe of Douglas Adams.
Date: Thursday 10 March 2005
Venue: The Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, London W1
Time: Lecture begins at 7.30pm
Speaker: Mark Carwardine
Price: £20 for main auditorium with a drink beforehand £12 for gallery seating without a drink
For information including how to buy tickets please see www.savetherhino.org.
Lecture synopsis: Zoologist Mark Carwardine (co-author of Last Chance to See with Douglas Adams) spends more than half the year travelling the world in search of wildlife and exploring wild places.
In this highly entertaining lecture Mark describes some of his experiences and encounters with wild animals and even wilder people around the world – including some hilarious behind-the-scenes stories from Last Chance to See. And, inevitably, he has a thing or two to say about the state of the world.
The lecture will be followed by a fundraising auction, lots will include signed film memorabilia, VIP tickets to the film premier and signed copies of the Quintessential Phase: Mostly Harmless radio script.
BAFTA Interactive Awards 2005
The 2nd March 2005 sees the BAFTA Interactive Awards ceremony, in which the BBC’s Twentieth Anniversary presentation of the original Infocom Interactive Fiction game of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is nominated in the Online Entertainment section. Having been responsible for the simple original online presentation of the game and been a past BAFTA juror, I’m keeping various bits of anatomy crossed for its success. Here’s hoping…
If you’ve arrived here from the BBC site, there’s a potted history of the Infocom game here, which includes never before seen scans of some of Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky’s original notes and designs, photos taken during development of the game, the original ZIL code from the game development (of historical interest only unless you happen have a spare 1980s vintage DEC-10 computer lying around, but may contain some game spoilers) and extracts from various interviews that Steve has given about life, the game and working with Douglas.