Month: August 2007

Good news: my gigabit ethernet switch arrived today.

Bad news: the network card in my old G4 doesn’t support jumbo frames. D’oh!

The switch is a Netgear GS108, by the way. I can’t remember why I plumped for this rather than the ‘domestic’ model (per-port something or other, or maybe the jumbo frame thing, or… something); very cheap at Amazon right now.

Meanwhile, working in front of this many pixels is a joy. Everyone should have two good LCD panels.

The pixels have landed. Bits of the SciCast publishing system only work with Internet Explorer on Windows, so for the last couple of months I’ve had a horrid dilemma: run Final Cut with a single monitor, or keep scrurrying around beneath the desk to replug the ‘second’ monitor between the Mac and the PC (yes, geek fans, I tried VNC – not quick enough for what I needed).

This week I succumbed to the inevitable, and bought my first new monitor in about five years. It’s a Samsung 206BW, and so far it seems lovely. I’m going to have to keep futzing around with colour profiles with it, and it’s damned bright (I’m now running it at around 40%, to avoid burning my retinas), but it’s looking pretty good.

The scary part is that if I tot all this up, I’m looking at rather more than 4 million pixels. If I open the MacBook it hits 5 million.

Reading the news today, something odd struck me. Colin Moses, chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, is quoted as saying:

“When Gordon Brown puts his 81,000 prisoners in prison, he puts them into the hands of my members, who have to put up with eight assaults a day.”

Compare and contrast with this piece about assistance calls from bus drivers, discussing statistics obtained by Tories in the London Assembly:

The statistics also show the incidents of code red calls — when the driver has to stop the bus and call for outside help — due to anti-social behaviour increased from 465 cases in September 2005 to 697 cases in October 2006.

It’s hard to compare the two sets of data, but on the face of it prisons are a safer work environment than London buses. Of course, even one assault is too many, but still… what?

For the last day or so I’ve been slaving over a clipsreel for SciCast — it’s finally up on the site. It’s not perfect, but I’m unreasonably proud of it.

Play it loud!

Technorati Tags: science, scicast, video

Media Guardian’s Organ Grinder has a nice wrap-up of the unFestival, quoting a bunch of people including yours truly. My own reflections:

I’m not remotely surprised by the lack of TV people present. They’ve paid good money to attend the TV Festival, and it’s a considerable risk. Plus, TV is this huge behemoth with hundreds of millions of pounds somewhere, which of course everyone is chasing. Digital media is a completely different world and it doesn’t work in anything like the same way.

Accordingly, I personally no longer expect the Big Ideas to come from TV. Perhaps TV people might be involved, but if you’re in the business of being good at TV that doesn’t necessarily extend to the web. We don’t expect book publishers to come up with great TV shows on the side — though in rare circumstances that does happen.

Hence, we need to stop looking to the TV people for creative, content-based leadership. They’re not a likely source.

However, the idea of growing the unFestival in the direction of something like SXSW is extremely good, in my book; there’s plenty of boundary-challenging work being done that’s exhibited in Edinburgh, so let’s see how broad an unconference we can foster.

Roll on 2008, I say.

Technorati Tags: tvunfestival, tvunfestival07

Something that came up today in discussion with Vinay: Freemasonry is Facebook 1.0.

I’m not sure how seriously I meant that.

[addendum: Vinay’s essentially the top Google hit for ‘Vinay Gupta,’ which is one heck of an achievement. In the future, when one’s income is index-linked to one’s PageRank, he’ll be loaded.]

Technorati Tags: observations, social software

It’s strangely reassuring to discover that even YouTube has outages. As I type, it’s been failing to respond to my hails for over an hour. Which makes a change from my own blog not talking to me.

Meanwhile, I’m gently breaking in Martin’s old Power Mac G4-450DP, which he’s donating to my Dad. There’s been a certain amount of RAM shuffling to make both this box and my almost-as-old-but-still-used-daily G4-933 roughly equally happy, and to work around some DIMMs that appear to have gone bad. At the moment, though, things are looking good.

That said, there’s still a stray hard drive inside the thing. Quite how we missed it I’ve no idea, but it’s showing on the desktop and is of sufficient vintage that it’s damned loud. Screwdriver poised and ready for the next time I have to restart for updates…

Meanwhile, as a reward for having read this far through a useless and frankly rather dull post, here’s the European Commission’s UK Press Room’s list of bogus EU stories from the UK press, with their rebuttals. Surprisingly entertaining, including the truth about bananas.

I had a blast at the unFestival yesterday, and regret not making it over to Edinburgh today for the ‘Best of…’ session in the main TV Festival. Mind you, I feel rough enough to have just cleaned the bath (which only seems to happen when I’m under the weather), so…

More later, doubtless. Also more as I grapple with MT4, which is looking pretty good, though making a clean start from my 2.2-vintage templates has been fiddly, and for all the talk about how lovely the default stylesheets are, I’m not terribly impressed with the typography.

Right now, I have Yorkshire puddings to cook, but in the meantime I’m delighted that Stellr at least got Twittered about.

The BBC iPlayer speaker hasn’t turned up. Oh, the irony. Heckles included:

“Neither has the player”

&

“It’s OK, none of us would be able to watch the presentation anyway”