The Daily Grind

Another test post. Comments are back, by the way, though note:

• You pretty much have to ‘comment anonymously,’ which is the equivalent of the old… er… just commenting.
• There’s one of those dreadful unreadable Captcha things, which almost certainly doesn’t work anyway and absolutely blocks anyone with vision impairments from commenting. I’ll see if I can find another way…
• ‘Anonymous’ comments are held for approval.

I’ll do something about the horrid font in due course. I know how much you all loved the old Baskerville, even if it was a bit on the small side.

Rrright. So… we have the green back, at least. And the posts seem to be here. The archives are borked, though, and since ‘archives’ includes individual entries I’m guessing comments are unreachable too.

But hey – ladies and gentlemen, MT4! Woohoo!

The actual upgrade was fairly painless, but convincing the system that I really did want to throw away my templates and start over was perhaps reassuringly hard. Unfortunately, the refresh option appears not to have inserted fresh archives templates, so… well, anyway.

MT4, and I’m going to bed.

If I could find one of those ‘under construction’ graphics we used to love back in 1997, I’d slap one of those here.

Woah! I completely missed this – Avid are discontinuing their FreeDV offering, which provided a limited version of Xpress for free. It was great for people learning to use Avid, and all the tools it offers. However:

Effective September 1, 2007, Avid is discontinuing the Avid Free DV application offer, and has no immediate plans to make an updated version available.

Get it while you can. From September, this leaves Liquid as Avid’s cheapest solution (£500), and Xpress Pro as the cheapest ‘proper’ Avid (£1245). Good education pricing, but still – Premiere Pro ($800) is back with a vengeance. Apple, meanwhile, really needs to update Final Cut Express ($300) to serve all the people abandoned by iMovie’08, though it’s still a stonkingly good package.

Wikipedia on the White Mulberry tree:

The White Mulberry is scientifically notable for the rapid plant movement of the pollen release from its catkins. The flowers fire pollen into the air by rapidly (25 µs) releasing stored elastic energy in the stamens. The resulting movement is in excess of half the speed of sound, making it the fastest known movement in the plant kingdom.

Outrun by a tree. Oh, the shame.

Here’s how patents work: when you invent something original, you document the nature of the invention and lodge that description with the Patent Office. Subsequently, anyone wanting to exploit your invention has to negotiate a license fee with you. I paraphrase, but you get the idea.

Thing is, we could have done this the other way around. Think about it:

When you mess something up in a new way, you document the type of mistake you made, and lodge that description with the Screwups Office. Subsequently, anyone committing the same mistake has to pay you a license fee.

As far as I can tell, these two systems are exactly equivalent, but opposite. And if we do one, why not the other too?

Can I file for a patent on a business model that’s the exact opposite of the patent system? And if I can, then I claim registered Screwup #1: the Patents system, a framework for rendering inventions inaccessible to people who had the same ideas independently.

Some menus wrap around; that is, if you go past the end, it zaps back to the beginning.

Some menus don’t.

Er… what? Didn’t we work this stuff out in, like, 1993?

And don’t even start me on scrolling speed and overlap margin inconsistency. It’s not that the interface is bad, see – it’s that it’s inconsistent. So unless you’re completely fanatical, you never quite know what the phone is going to do.

I’ve pushed three new films live on SciCast: here, here, and here. Yes, I know the links to the experiment pages are broken, and that the ‘this link is broken’ page is itself broken, and that the draughts film doesn’t fast-start. We’ll get there. 🙂

I just hooked my phone to my PC for the first time in a few weeks, and tried the Nokia software update tool. Previously, it hadn’t recognised the phone model number, since Orange UK use a custom variation.

Good news: this time it agrees there’s an update, and is downloading 11.0.026. Which isn’t the most recent firmware going, but whatever.

Bad news: the N95 crashed during install, and on reboot appears to be unresponsive. Merde.

[update: leaving it a few minutes without power, it now starts up. I’m attempting to update again.]

[sigh]

[update 2: nope. Tried three times, and the phone crashes out each time, at the same point. Nokia forums are full of people having problems even with the latest 12.0.014. My advice remains: avoid the Nokia N95 at all costs, it’s a shambles.]

Flossie and I have a new game: send the other person a food parcel via Tesco delivery, and require them to blog what they concoct from the contents. The opening salvo in this trial of wit and culinary cunning was an unchallenging shot across the bows, but I sense a degree of escalation may be involved in my retaliatory volley.

So: a question to the web geeks here – how might we pressure Tesco to add an API to their service, so we can do BBC Backstage/Tesco TV dinner mashups? Or integrate Google Maps, get Tesco to deliver to GPS coordinates, and thus do on-demand drop-delivery geocaching.

Come to think of it, my phone has a GPS unit – why can’t I do operations like ‘I’m up this mountain and really fancy a bun. Tesco!’ ?

We took the decision to host SciCast films ourselves – rather than use YouTube, Revver, Blip, etc – 18 months ago, so it’s interesting looking back and trying to work out whether we were right. The list goes like this:

Quality. Old Flash video (Sorenson Spark) plain sucks. It was fine in its day, but that was 10 years ago. The frame-rate is poor, the compression blocks obliterate fine detail – even more significant when you’re making technical films – and it looks really rubbish when blown-up to project on a classroom wall, which is a typical use case for us. YouTube’s presumed move to H.264 will mitigate this, but see my previous post about high-quality stuff.

Rights. I believe YouTube changed their licensing package last year – I should explore this. But I’ve a sneaking suspicion that by uploading films you still grant YouTube some control. I can do that for films we own, but contributed SciCast films are under CC licenses, so I don’t have the authority to assign subsidiary rights except under Share-Alike. Which means contributors would have to upload directly. Which might be fine, but SciCast is also about editorial quality, not just sheer numbers. Tricky, and messy.

Advertising. Advertising around educational content is a thorny issue, and I’d rather duck it entirely. As I understand it, the UK ban on advertising ‘junk’ food to children applies to print and broadcast, though not the web. If that should change, not having control over advertiser focus would simply be untenable. YouTube have recently started running ads over video, too, which makes a lot of sense, but isn’t something that would be acceptable in a classroom environment.

Comment Moderation. I feel very strongly that a site aimed at children should be a ‘safe’ browsing environment. That means, crucially, pre-moderated comments – nothing gets published before it’s been read. You can now do this on YouTube, but the proximity to other content (as little as one click from something over which you have no control) makes it hard to maintain a buffer. So you end up building your own site anyway, and embedding YouTube videos – all you really gain is a clean upload mechanism. Which is significant, but not enough, because:

Blocking. YouTube is often blocked by school and/or Local Authority-level firewalls. Game over.

It’s easy to assume that YouTube ‘owns’ web video, and that doing anything else is swimming against the tide. I don’t hold to that, since I think video is easy and it’s what you do with it that’s hard. YouTube is the cable TV of the web – oceans of material with the occasional gem bobbing around. What I’m trying to build is more like BBC4 – targeted at specific audiences, and hence with a much higher hit-rate. I’m trying to build something that’s fun and useful.

…which is partly why I’m keen on a middle ground between a commissioning model (cf. broadcast), and a free-for-all (cf. YouTube). There aren’t many sites taking such an approach, but one prominent example is Current.tv.