Category: technology

20th Century Charging kills 21st Communication

Twitter to/from SMS suspended for Australia: http://twitter.com/blog/2007/04/twitter-down-under.html

I’m with Leslie: the mobile phone networks in Australia suk0Rz. Big time. The devices are like bricks in pretty colours and think the world revolves around some backend that locks you in via your goolies.

There is all this talk about open source software, open source protocols, open source content, open source file formats – yet we have no alternative and freedom in the airwaves. Ham radio isn’t going to cut it.

TCP/IP is going to be everywhere one day. It isn’t going to matter what device you have. You’ll be online streaming up and down “stuff”

Oh well, thanks to Twitteresce, It’s not so bad. (ooh, 0.6. Time to upgrade)

Big Day in Queensland

A big thankyou to Scot Steinhardt, Principal of Mount Gravatt High School. He runs a tight ship, and had a big day yesterday with “big names” arriving from all corners of Australia to get some of his time.  Thanks, Scot. And live that dream!

To all the teachers who attended and answered my random questions. Thanks.

Also, thanks to Sean Tierney for hosting me – and providing some excellent guidance from a professional’s perspective. Notes from my day are posted here, for comments.

Year 10 (and the Year 11s who subversively arrived, too) at Mount Gravatt: remember Astronauts and Princesses. You guys have the opportunity to do anything you want. First thing, is ensure that the Wikipedia entries for your school, and your local area are up to date and informative.

Later that night, Difference of Opinion on the ABC covered this whole area of the digital generation gap.

And even later, Chris Saad, Cody Robb and I had a long discussion on the debate. Mount Gravatt came up in the podcast. The world is small when its highly connected.

Introducing me mate, Paul Foster

IMG_1315Paul Foster, he of landed gentry and serf owner in England (all I know is that it ain’t London), is starting to blog more. Being a smarter chap than I, and more experienced with robots and Microsoft stuff, he gets to write about cool things like exploding dunnies.

With the connection to my new English friend, Nick Hodge, I am coming over all emotional about revisiting the old-dart soon.

God love the English.

Doing more than Dumb Video

Dumb Video is hard. You spend all your time editing, fixing audio, encoding and uploading.

Smart Video is going to be easy with this Microsoft Silverlight stuff. URLs, chapters, and deeper sub-tagging. All these ideas are flowing through my mind from this conversation from Uncle Dave, the Life Kludger.

Imagine a canvas of videos and podcasts. Zoom into one, and see the “sub-tags” or links to other videos, or general searches. Sort of a doing what HTML does for text for other, non-textual content.

Time to learn some new stuff.

Another Monday, Too Much Software

silverlight

Well, it’s not quite a normal Monday. Today is the first day of NAB2007, Las Vegas in the US.

Apple has new software toys. Shame I don’t do production on a Mac.

Adobe has pre-release Premiere Pro and AfterEffects CS3 to help you use up spare bandwidth.

And Microsoft has announced something new called Silverlight! Well, actually it’s that strangely named WPF/e with a name that actually works.

Additional (6:30pm)

Experiment with Software Robots

Would you like to experiment with robots?

Microsoft has released a tool called the Microsoft Robotics Studio where you can visually program.

Rather than typing commands, you draw boxes and lines to represent your robot. One day it would be cool to create a robot and send it into a virtual 3D world. It could be like an explorer, and return with a list of sights that it saw.

 How else could simulated robots be used?

Be your own TV

Video camera, stream up, people watch your life. Obviously, this mechanism of publishing is old as the internet itself – but with bandwidth increasing and alpha-geeks / rock-stars emerging in recent years – we are seeing the new world being born.

The initial years of large company sponsored video-on-the web (think soapflakes sponsors in the 1950s) was followed by soap operas on YouTube (think LonelyGirl15) to reality TV of Justin.tv (think Survivor, without the dramatic editing)

Insert 3D worlds of WoW, SecondLife and the like – we are seeing Snow Crash and True Names appear before our eyes.

How long before thegeekstories.com is a live-to-web experience?