dcinput

The goal of the Condor Project is to develop, implement, deploy, and evaluate mechanisms and policies that support High Throughput Computing (HTC) on large collections of distributively owned computing resources. More of a note for myself but you might find it interesting if you’re interesting in distributed computing and things like render farms. I guess you could say I am.

Getting started with Condor from Linux Journal.

Windows is 21 years old today.

I’ve spent the past while writting what started out as a small piece about some ideas I had over the weekend, it ended up being so long it broke out into an entire article all of it’s own - The Disintermediation of Film Making.

Mike Ambs‘ edit of ‘Human Labotomy’ [the first edit of the Net Neutrality Open Source Documentary was by Arin Crumley], is an excellent piece of work. The net neutrality debate has been going for a while, I’ve written about it several times. I find this documentary project important for several reasons.

These two edits do a fantastic job of painting the net neutrality picture. The subject isn’t a trivial matter to understand. I’ve been reading things for many months now and it’s the first time I’ve seen something that fully and simply puts across the message. This is done by looking back at the evolution of previous forms of media intercut with recent interviews with important web figures like Tim Berneres Lee and Lawrence Lessig, all to well chosen background music.

It uses the web a platform for documentary making. Using publicly available media that is available on the web in places like YouTube, Google Video, Podzinger and Delicious and by publishing project files under some form of creative commons license they are enabling others to re-edit and release their own versions. By watching and re-watching you learn more things and see new perspectives.

It helps to spread the word, start conversations and get people involved.

I really like projects that use the web in new ways. I know this isn’t the first open source style film making project but there’s something about one that pushes the boundaries of film making using the web while at the same time trying to save it.

Podcastcon UK is later today. I got a last minute ticket so I’ll be there sampling some of the atmosphere. Should be fun!

More on the conference later. A conversation happening on the Yahoo Videoblogging mailing list has caught my attention.

The other Videoblogging Community

Eric Rice: “They might not come from YOUR world, but they are part of the world”. Watch the video on his post before you read on.

I’ve been subscribed to the the mailing list for a few weeks now. I’m no videoblogger but I’m really interested in the space and it was a good way to see what was going on in it.

What Eric was pointing out was that over the past few years different videoblogging communities have developed. Sites such as MySpace and YouTube make it very easy to publish video to the world but because of the way these sites are implemented the new and often thriving communities are kept within a walled garden.

Many of the people on the Yahoo list were among the innovators in the whole videoblogging movement and the question which is arrising seems to be whether the community they have built has infact become a walled garden in itself. You see many of the people on the list seem at times to look down on these other communities for various reasons.

In a seperate thread Andrew Baron of Rocketboom asks “What next?”.

An important part of communites of all types is the bonding that occurs in between all its members. In order for different communities to live in harmoney together another equally important activity is bridging between them.

With so much creativity from all these web video pioneers, surely there must be a way to start conversations between these communities. Imagine the fun that would ensue when videobloggers behind these walled gardens suddenly realised other entire communities were reaching out, trying to talk to them.

What would this do to the companies like YouTube and MySpace? If we lead by example maybe the walls would crumble.

I’ve been pretty impressed with Google Docs and so I thought I would test out posting directly from it. If it works I might start using it to write some of my posts. I don’t think it will be able to handle my daily posts though as I tend to write these throughout the day as opposed to doing it in one go.

Looks like I can successfully post. I wonder what happens when I edit the document and repost.

Unfortunatley as I expected, it seems that a repost after an edit creates a whole new post which will make it hard to blog throughout the day into 1 post only. Shame. If you know a way around this, let me know!

I’ve been pretty impressed with Google Docs and so I thought I would test out posting directly from it. If it works I might start using it to write some of my posts. I don’t think it will be able to handle my daily posts though as I tend to write these throughout the day as opposed to doing it in one go.

Looks like I can successfully post. I wonder what happens when I edit the document and repost.

I’ve been pretty impressed with Google Docs and so I thought I would test out posting directly from it. If it works I might start using it to write some of my posts. I don’t think it will be able to handle my daily posts though as I tend to write these throughout the day as opposed to doing it in one go.

The Times BFI London Film Festival have been doing a video podcast.

Dana Gardner: “Microsoft will partner with Novell to support SuSe Linux as an alternative deployment platform to Windows — and that they announce it on the cusp of the arrival of Windows Vista”. Big news.
More about it on Techmeme.

AdvertisingAge: Mobile version of YouTube by the end of 2007. View from Techcrunch.

BBC Technolgy: “Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said he wants to set up a web science research project to study the social implications of the web’s development.”

Richard MacManus: “Berners-Lee spoke about how even in the field of economics, it’s not just about studying the money part of the dot com era, but how things like Page Rank have influenced the system - “the way effectively the currency now flows across the links as kudos, as reputation of web sites”. So with this initiative they want to bring together lots of different disciplines (computing, biology, economics, etc), as well as focusing on understanding and engineering the Web as one big system.”

In my last year of school, when it came to choosing university courses, I remember how incredibly hard it was. I had a vague idea that it was going to be in the science/engineering field, but I found chossing a particular direction really hard because there were aspects of all the courses that I liked. In the end what attracted me to Materials Science and Engineering was the broadness: physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, economics and more.

After finishing the degree, the problem of finding a particular direction hadn’t gone away, in fact in many ways it had gotten worse since my aquired knowledge was spread across so many disciplines, I had many interests but it was hard to have a focus.

At the time I really didn’t know much about computers, in fact I had never owned one. Luckily the university facilities were very good and so I didn’t really need to actually own one. After a time it started to dawn on me that computing might be the subject that was drawing all the subjects I was interested in together. That’s why I went back to do a Computing degree. It turned out to be one of the best decissions I ever made. I remember on the first day of lectures one of the lecturers told us that at the end of the course we would look at the world in a totally different way, and he was right.

Why am I telling you all this? I wanted to try to explain the background to why I think the new Web Sciences Research Initiative being setup by Tim Berners-Lee is so incredibly important. The web fascinates me on a daily basis. It is an open playing field, full of creativity and it is inherently multidisciplinary but it is also chaotic and complicated. It’s high time we started exploring the web in a scientific but also holistic way, by drawing from the social sciences too. Sure, it’s about technology, but most of all it’s about people.

Blogger’s block

Somehow over the last month I fell into a sort of bloggers block. It’s similar to writters block, though I imagine entirely different. You write most days and you enjoy it. Then suddenly something happens that makes you miss say a week. So then when you come to write again you end up thinking to yourself that you sure as hell better write something interesting. Of course in the time that you’ve been procrastinating, the world has kept on going and the conversations have moved on and though you’ve been reading them, you’re suddenly an outsider. And it’s just stupid. So there comes a time when you just have to draw a line under it all and move on, so this is that post.

This last month

Earlier this month I went to Steve Wozniak’s (a.k.a Woz) book launch. He’s a real intesting character. First thing you notice is that this guy is real smart. He’s also a propper geek. Most of all what comes accross though is an unbelievable enthusiasm for all things tech. It was totally inspiring.

Irina Slutsky of Geek Entertainment TV went to The Segwey Polo in the Park. I’ve heard that Woz organised such a thing, but always wanted to see it. Side note: Irina has the strangest way of speaking ever. Love it!

I’ve recently joined the videoblogging Yahoo mailing list. There’s around 2000 members worldwide. I don’t have any imediate plans to start a videoblog but I am really interested in the space. I just want to see what people are talking about, see if there is any way I can help. I’d love to build some tools.

This Saturday is The Vloggies: “The Vloggies honor the involvement of the videoblogging community of creators, toolsmiths, delivery platforms and viewers. Culminating in one real-time, real-world evening event, the awards will be announced on November 4th in San Francisco, California. The evening will be podcast for anytime-anywhere viewing through PodTech.net and iTunes”. Go and vote!

I was at a fantastic Halloween party on Tuesday night just gone. Lots of great costumes. We played all sorts of games including scarry sherades, murder mystery in the dark and apple bopping. Super low quality movie of my friend Will fighting with an apple. Just in case your wondering he’s dressed as Bender from Futurama.

Spam, spam, spam

I’ve noticed recently that I’m getting an unbelievable amount of comment spam on the blog. I hadn’t noticed because they tend to be on really old posts but I’ve deleted over 4000 of them in the last few days. Its pretty much all viagra and porn. I’ve tightened things up a little so I have to approve you once before you can start posting comments. Thing is that I’m now gettting gundreds of email a day. How do I stop this?