dcinput

Dave Winer: “Why not let me go, quietly and peacefully, I’ll stop writing my blog, I’ll stop developing new stuff, you can be me if you want, I won’t be in your way. How about it?”

Quite appropriate that this should be the first entry in my new blog format. I really hope Dave doesn’t ever stop his blog. I would really miss it. A lot.

The Forbes Billionaires List: Ronald Perelman who recently bought the parent company of where I work is number 94 with $6.1 bn.

Which Muppet are you? The Muppets Personality Test. I’m Gonzo!

Google Mars - you ‘ve got to be kiding me. Hmm Mars sure seems pretty small these days.

Wired magazine reports that “Sweden is one of the worst places in the world when it comes to illegal sharing” due to bit torrent.

OM Malik writes that MySpace is about to release a Messenger service cleverly called MySpace Messenger. I’ve never quite figured out the point with MySpace. I mean sure I have an account (can you guess what the login is?) and sure, trying to get as many hot girls and famous bands as your friends is fun for 10 minutes, but whats the point? It will no doubt be a success though.

The New York Times: “Hewlett-Packard has a mode on its new R-series that it says removes the 10 pounds a camera is said to add”.

Mitchell Szczepanczyk wrote a piece called the “The death of the blogosphere” a couple of weeks back about how big businesses were in the process of creating a multi-tiered internet which will kill “net neutrality” and eventually destroy the web. He was also interviewed on the small WORLD podcast a few days ago about this. The topic has been aproached several times by Adam Curry on recent episodes of the DSC.

I need to do some more research on the subject as to be honest I don’t really understand that side of the argument that well yet. I’m not even entirely sure we’re talking about the same thing. It’s definitely something that could have a major impact on the roleout of d-cinema over the next few years. I’ve recently heard several convincing arguments why a multi-tiered system would help the world of d-cinema. I’d love to hear people’s views on this topic.

Lately I’ve been finding it hard to find time to put fingers to keyboard and turn out a consistent amount of content on the blog. It can be partially attributed to a massively hectic work schedule, the documentary making course I’m attending and the need to fill every last minute of my day nerding away for my RHCT course and exam at the end of the month.

However I’ve realised that it might also be the way that I’m bloging. Let me explain.

The default title-then-post format of the Wordpress blog is starting to get me down. It just doesn’t fit in right to life when you’re busy with other stuff all the time. You see this format kind of forces you to write about 1 theme per post…essay style. The reality is that its just too time consuming. The other thing is that a lot of the time I don’t want to write an essay. Often I just want to link to a whole bunch of different articles that I’ve come across throughout the day with really short comments. Other times though, when I’ve got more time, I like to spend some time researching a piece and write about it in depth.

So I’ve decided to try a slightly new format. Starting tomorrow there will be two types of posts:

1. “dcinput daily” posts - One each day (hopefully) which will grow throughout the day with small posts to interesting things I come accross (a la Scripting News)
2. Longer essay type posts - whenever I have time to go into something in a little more depth.

I’m hoping to figure out how to get the OPML Editor to work with Wordpress. I’m pretty sure I remember reading that someone figured it out. Anyways let me know what you think.

YouTube is very rapidly becoming my favorite site on the internet. There is simply so much wonderful stuff there. The Robomule is both amazing and a little scary. Its incredible that it just knows how to walk around, however it just looks wrong. Funny how I just watched iRobot for the first time over the weekend. Hey this might be closer than we think!

I’ve recently had my Linux training approved at work and hopefully I’ll be a Red Hat Certified Technician by the beguining of April and a Red Hat Certified Engineer by the end of the summer. I’d be really interested in hearing about people’s experiences doing either of these courses…how long you took to study/practice, any recommended books etc.

Last weekend was pretty hectic with an early start to Friday, following the NME fun on Thursday night, I met up with some old buddies from my UCL days and we made tracks for Bournemouth where we met up with Henry Van Der Beek. Henry was on the MSc course at UCL with us and I later worked with him at the Creature Shop for a time. He’s doing the MSc in Animation and plans to take the world of rag doll simulation by storm. The man has an unhealthy obsession with manga and martial arts fight sequences. I very much enjoyed hearing geeky stories of what he’s doing with their render farm. Amusing that little bits of Python and SQL in just the right places can keep you at the top of the render queue without anyone noticing. He’s running rings around them. Hehe.

I did try to moblog this photo as we left Waterloo but I had forgotten to rewire by moblog setup what with my new Wordpress blog. So here I am testing out the the new setup. Left to right: Lloyd, Dan and Patrick. Great night in Bournemouth. Hmmm…shall we say, a very interesting night life….from my mobile

[Update: Urrrgh the moblog test was a miserable ugly failure. I had to go and edit it all by hand afterwards. The picture was in the wrong place and the text was all over the place. I was using the functionality that flickr offers - blog via email using the MetaWeblog API. Anyone got any better ways of doing this?? Thanks.]

[Update 2: God what a mess. In the end I had to delete the post and redo it from the normal wordpress admin interface because it somehow totally screwed up the sidebar of the blog. Urgh. I like it better when things just work.:(]