Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Lately I’ve been looking forward to watching the daily Rocketboom video blog, and have struggled to explain both Rocketboom and video blogging in general to non-blog-reading, TV-watching folks, i.e. most normal people. So until I get around to writing a longer introduction to video (and regular) blogging for my non-blogging / non-blog-reading friends, just go check it out .

Rocketboom features Amanda Congdon reading headlines and incorporating other video blog postings on the internet in a news-style format. It’s a little like Jon Stewart’s Daily Show with a bit of Jane Curtin’s old SNL Weekend Update thrown in, mixing up random video clips.

I enjoyed this clip posted earlier this week, which features David Letterman-style page tossing at the end of each article, David Lynch’s (of Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet etc) daily weather report from L.A., and a vintage black-and-white television ad for Wham-O frisbees.

Here’s another project, Ndiyo, working on reducing the cost of IT for rural and developing markets. Their system is called Nivo, and uses a thin client approach to reduce the number of separate systems that need to be operated and maintained, vs the HP 4-4-1 which adds display, keyboards, and mice to a single Linux system. Some benefits of consolidating more users onto shared hardware include the centralized administration, lower power consumption, and lower cost per seat. Similar approaches can be implemented for Microsoft Windows, but unrestricted / free licensing is particularly attractive in the rural markets.

Pictures and story at BBC, Engadget, comments (some even on topic) at Slashdot

not-for-profit UK developers Ndiyo are looking at using them to bring more affordable computing to the developing world. They’ve designed a small (12 x 8 x 2cm), sub-$200 thin client box called Nivo that runs on open source software and has ports for ethernet, keyboard, mouse, monitor and power.

More fun with Google Maps, Google RideFinder displays the location of GPS-enabled taxis for a few locations in the US. This is just a concept demo, since there aren’t a lot of GPS-enabled taxi services at the moment, but interesting to play with.

After reading this, I see an opportunity for a business management book, something like “29 Leadership Secrets From Darth Vader“…

Darth Vader’s weblog, via MetaFilter. For the full effect, start at the first post.

Have I mentioned before that I am surrounded by idiots? Let me cut to chase and just tell you up front: the rebels got away. All of them. General Veers, bless his heart, must have destroyed two dozen armed speeders and and an entire line of infantry — but those were just ants. We failed to take Mothma, Organa, Rieekan, Skywalker or even the traiterous fish Ackbar.

See also: Things Not To Say to Darth Vader at the Water Cooler

I see that the Yahoo MyWeb service has launched.

• Move beyond bookmarks - create your own personal, searchable web

• Save all the pages you like (exact copies, not just links!)

• Search My Web to instantly “re-find” your saved pages

• Share only the pages you want - you’re in control

• Turn on My Search History to quickly access past searches and visited results

On the one hand, both this and the Google Search History seem potentially useful, and I’m planning to try them out to see how they work and how they might evolve. On the other hand, I seem to have a little reflexive mistrust of the potential misuse of these sort of centrally operated data aggregators. I keep having an impulse to go clean out the browser cookies and start running everything through an anonymizing proxy…

Been thinking a bit lately about dealing with video, converged media, and search, came across a couple of interesting pieces on video search and digital content in general, first one on John Batelle’s SearchBlog, which in turn references a longer article by Mark Glaser at the Annenberg Online Journalism Review.

Ourmedia, SingingFish, and Brightcove are profiled briefly, along with Google Video Upload, Yahoo Video, and Open Media Network.

From the Glaser article:

Howe estimates there could be 300 million video streams online, but Singingfish has still only scratched the surface with just under 20 million streams indexed. Singingfish also crawls adult content — literally anything that’s legal — and includes a “Family Filter” with pretty conservative rules for what partner sites or individuals can filter out (including sex education material).

Came across a post linking to this nerd test while looking into the Semiologic Static Front Page plugin for WordPress.

Overall, you scored as follows:

6% scored higher (more nerdy), and
94% scored lower (less nerdy).

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:

Supreme Nerd. Apply for a professorship at MIT now!!!.

Hmm. Only 94%?

Catching up on Abhishek Puri’s Broadband Blog, found this post referencing an old (1998) paper on setting up private ISPs in India.

Also another post regarding planned rate reductions on leased lines.

One of the long term challenges for the Kuppam i-Community program I’m working with is to make their broadband services economically sustainable, even though it serves a low-income, rural commmunity in India. While the program is making good use of wireless technology to bring down the costs of intra-regional connectivity, the cost of external internet connectivity has remained high, and has been dominated by leased line expense.

It remains to be seen whether the Kuppam program will be able to find a service provider to partner with in the region or whether it will need to form an ISP-like entity to provision and operate the network on behalf of the other community programs that are making use of the service. There have been numerous statements of intent by operators planning to provide wider access to broadband network service in Andhra Pradesh, although so far none are actually available.

I have liked the Sipura products since they first came out a few years ago. The SPA products are widely used by VoIP service providers (Vonage, etc) for their feature set, flexibility, and low cost. We have been testing out Sipura adapters on the Kuppam network for the past few months, with good results, and I just received a new SPA-3000 the other day which I haven’t gotten around to setting up for use with Asterisk yet.

Yesterday Cisco announced they will also acquire Sipura, which will be merged into Linksys.

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 26, 2005 - Cisco Systems® today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Sipura Technology, Inc. This represents Cisco’s first acquisition for its Linksys division, the leading provider of wireless and networking hardware for home, Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) and small business environments. Sipura is a leader in consumer voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology and is a key technology provider for Linksys’ current line of VoIP networking devices. In addition to Sipura’s valuable technology and customer relationships, their experienced team with extensive VoIP expertise will help build a foundation for Linksys’ internal research and development capabilities in voice, video and other markets.

This recent article at AnandTech compares several current PCI TV tuner cards, including

• ATI’s eHome Wonder
• ATI’s TV Wonder Elite
• AverMedia M150
• eMuzed Maui-II PCI PVR
• Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250
• NVIDIA’s dual tuner NVTV

The Hauppauge PVR-250 and the ATI TV Wonder Elite are relatively expensive but have visibly better performance in the various tests on the cards. These are all standard video input, so the image quality is also limited by the signal feed from the cable company.

I’ve been quite pleased with the Hauppauge PVR-350 I’ve been working with recently, which incorporates the same tuner and video encoder as the PVR-250. I’d be interested in seeing a comparison with the more recent PVR-150 at some point. I selected the Hauppauge over some of the alternatives on the basis of both video quality and the availability of software, since some of the other tuner hardware is essentially Windows-only. In contrast the Hauppauge hardware has extensive support under Linux, in projects like MythTV, FreeVo, MediaPortal, etc.

Perhaps another alternative to Google Video upload, or is this more like the photo hosting sites? I’d like to find a way to get my personal media data closer to the internet backbone, so it’s not strangled by the slow pipe into the house, but I also don’t want all of it publicly indexed and accessible. With the photo hosting sites, they’re mostly either affiliated with a photofinisher, and are looking for print and merchandise revenue, or they’re selling to space to people who just need image storage and bandwidth.

From John Battelle’s Searchblog

Mike Homer, of Netscape and now Kontiki, and Marc Andreessen, of Netscape and now Opsware, have launched the Open Media Network, a free platform for the storage and distribution of public video and audio content. I spoke to Homer about the new network, which uses Kontiki’s video serving system on the back end. The system is a mashup of sorts between Tivo and BitTorrent - it has a well considered interface and employes a secure P2P network for file distribution (it doesn’t actually use Tivo or BitTorrent technology).

More fun with Google Maps and TiVo.

Haven’t been looked much lately at developing directly on TiVo hardware vs trying ideas out on MythTV-style PVR platforms while experimenting with video, media servers, and TV-centric information appliances. A while back it looked like you could hack things into the TiVo, but it seemed that the main advantage of the TiVo was that it worked out of the box and it was relatively cheap compared to building your own, i.e. it was an actual product, not a development platform. Building a system from parts, i.e. MythTV on Linux or Windows Media PC, isn’t an end-user-friendly activity, but can give you Unix-like flexibility where everything is possible, but you may need to do it all yourself.

Saw an article about TiVo’s latest plug for developing applications on the TiVo, I should go take another look.

Oops. That’s why you’re supposed to scrub the hard drive before getting rid of the computer…

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense is facing major embarrassment, and the threat of having lost classified military data, based on a man’s claim that he found a large number of sensitive files created by the government on a laptop handed to him at a garbage dump.

I’m still wrestling with what to do about my next notebook computer. I’m probably going to end up with something like an IBM T42 or an HP nc6220, but I keep toying with the idea of changing my entire work setup to be more mobile and perhaps returning back to a full desktop system or something like that.

In the meantime, someone’s found some photos and documents on the unreleased IBM X41 Thinkpad on the FCC web site. (via Slashdot)

You’ve got to love the FCC when you’re craving information for rumored devices and these pics found on the FCC site depict an IBM Thinkpad X41 Tablet PC. No real surprises in these pics, the depicted Tablet looks just like a Thinkpad. Looks like it has Bluetooth and a dual antenna WiFi. Except, of course, for the swivel screen.

updated 04-26-2005: X41 discussion at Thinkpads.com

A couple of days ago, I posted about the Nikon RAW image format and the general issue of access to “digital negatives”. Interest in this topic has been building for a while, and this being the age of instant communities of interest, we now have the OpenRAW group:

OpenRAW is a group of photographers and other interested people advocating the open documentation of digital camera RAW files.

After Canon dropped support for their Canon D30 DSLR in their latest software release and Nikon removed features of their own RAW converter Nikon Capture, plus the encryption of features in Nikon’s D2x digital camera RAW format (NEF), some members of the mailing list D1scussion founded the OpenRAW mailing list to coordinate their efforts to motivate camera makers to openly document their individual RAW formats.

This web site is the first result from this discussion and has the goal to gain public awareness of the RAW Problem.

There is also some followup and the official response from Nikon at DPReview.com:

The Big Sur Marathon has a well-deserved reputation for being difficult, scenic, and well run. This is my second time at Big Sur, having run it last year (2004) as well. It’s my 3rd marathon overall, after starting as a novice runner in 2002. I’m continuing to build an aerobic base and improving my running mechanics, so each time out on the course is another experiment and learning experience.

During the past year I’ve maintained a base mileage of 45-55 miles per week, with no major injuries. I’ve regularly logged 13-16 mile runs during the past year, but have only gone up to 18 miles on this training cycle, vs the previous year where I put in four 20 mile runs and weekly hill intervals. From my training log paces and HR data I can see that I’m in better base condition than the previous year, but going in I’m uncertain about how things will hold up after 3 hours on the road.

Link to News.com article here

I was just trying out the performance of different video encodings over WLAN yesterday, and had been thinking about scenarios where something like this might make sense, given that people are starting to carry around more powerful client devices.

Singapore Airlines already runs a great video- and audi0-on-demand service on their flights, but it requires essentially a full PC under every seat. Moving to a bring-your-own client entertainment format might not make sense for SQ, but would be a huge improvement for me on United or any other US-flag airline.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy to clog up the shared bandwidth with high quality video, and you can’t really solve an “on-demand” bandwidth problem using multicast. I’m not even sure they could count on using 802.11g or a to get the higher bandwidth, as there aren’t that many 802.11a clients around, and a mixed 802.11b/g network won’t give you the performance unless you keep out the 802.11b clients. Going the other way, I don’t think people would be terribly happy with 150-300kbps “broadband internet” quality video streams on an airline flight, but I could be wrong.

I rarely sit down and just listen to my music collection these days. Most of the time, any music I hear is on the radio, computer or CD player while driving, or working, or generally doing something else. My largest weekly block of music listening time is using an MP3 player during treadmill workouts.

So, it was interesting yesterday evening when I started noticing how bad MP3 encoded tracks sound compared with the original CDs.

I’m old enough to have actually purchased physical media (first vinyl, then CD) for nearly all the music I presently own. However, I have rarely gone back and played the actual CDs I’ve purchased for several years, as the first step after removing the wrapper is to encode them and put the bits on the file server. When my daughter was a little younger, duplicate CDs were being replaced weekly after being stepped on, spilled on, turned into art projects, and other mishaps. Other sets have been left behind on airplanes, rental cars, etc. Having everything on the server has allowed us to enjoy the music without worrying about physically destroying or losing the original.

Someone got around to picking apart the raw image format for Nikon cameras. From an article today on News.com:

A Massachusetts programmer says he has broken a proprietary encryption code that has effectively forced some Nikon digital camera owners to use the company’s own software.

Because Nikon scrambled a portion of the file, legal worries have kept third-party developers like Adobe Systems from supporting Nikon’s uncompressed “raw” photos in their software. Nikon sells its Nikon Capture utility for $100.

Nikon’s white-balance encryption had hindered photographers who preferred other, sometimes faster or more capable, image conversion software by making it infeasible to convert large numbers of images. Canon–which bundles its raw conversion software with its cameras and does not charge extra–does not encrypt its photo metadata.