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All this week I am at a Redhat training course for Redhat Certified Engineer (RHCE). It’s pretty hardcore. Most of the people on the course have been doing Unix/Soloaris/Linux for over 10 years. So much information to cram into this little head. Managed to find some free wireless on the north river front near Bank.

The City of London where the course is, seems such a different place than the edges of Soho that I am used to. It’s a bustling hive of financial activity. The atmosphere smells of money, everybody needs to get somewhere fast. Maybe this is a financial equivalent of Silicon Valley?

I am now a Flickr Pro! I started using the Flickr uploader for OSX and it makes uploading photos to Flickr so painless that I know I am going to need more space. Can’t believe I didn’t try it sooner. At times you might find some of my photos strange, but I just take pictures of things I find interesting.

New Flickr set: Secret Garden Party 2006.

Another new Flickr set: Bunratty Castle.

By the way my camera is the rubbish one on my Motorolla V3 Razor. You can actually get some pretty OK photos with it if you know what your doing. I kind of like the chalenge sometimes. I guess these are the black and white photos of the future.

I don’t currently have internet connection at home, and I won’t until I move into the new place. It’s driving me mad. How is it that I am this reliant on the web?

BBC News reports on net neutrality and what Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, has to say about it. “What’s very important from my point of view is that there is one web. Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring”.

It does worry me that the roll out of digital cinema around the globe could contribute negatively in the long run to the net neutrality issue. I’d hate to look back in 20 years and think that I played a part in breaking the web. Dave Winer says that the dark nets are already here, and he’s right of course.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I am on a Redhat course this week which is pretty much taking up all my time. It’s linux 9 to 5 and then revison till midnight as soon as I get home for the exam which is on Friday. Exams aren’t much fun and my brain is starting to melt.

Those of you who visited the site over the weekend might have noticed this page here instead. I managed to exceed my bandwidth for the month and have had to double it. It’s nice to see more people are reading! Sorry for the outage.

I was up in Nottingham this weekend with Toby Harris (*spark) doing the visuals for a huge bank holiday Sunday club night called Detonate. The night brought together the Rock City, Stealth and Rescue Rooms venues to create one big drum & bass / hip hop / electronic bonanza with a few live bands thrown in for good messure. We were in the main room and Toby’s incredible VJing onto two enormous screens each side of the stage was the focal point for the 1000 strong crowd during sets by LTJ Bukem, Andy C and others. Many thanks to James and Kath
from Detonate for putting us up in a lovely hotel and thanks to Toby for showing me the world of VJing.

I’ve been finding Ze Frank pretty funny. Especially the ‘poop’ showdown with Rocketboom in last Friday’s episode.

Creative planet have put together some video footage of interviews at NAB 2006. Great if you couldn’t be there.

The Burning Man 2006 funded installations. I like the sunflowers.

The Wall Street Journal tells of how hedge funds are getting into movies.

There’s been much talk of the LindenLabs online game/virtual community Second Life recently. Adam Curry has been having parties at his virtual Castle attended by listeners and podcasters alike.

I bumped into one of the producers / designers of the game last week and had a very interesting chat about future plans for the game. The infrastructure they are building to accomodate their predicted number of users is simply stagering and it seems they are looking at improving image quality too. The sort of definition they are talking about is going to take some serious bandwidth. When countries like Japan can get Gigabit speeds to their mobile it’s no wonder they are planning big and it’s no wonder they are looking at what part mobile technology will play aswell.

Project Entropia which competes directly with Second Life is offering a real world cash card to gamers so they can spend the money they accumulate in the virtual world…in the real world.

BBC News: “Last year $165m passed through the game and the founders of the online Universe expect that to at least double in 2006″. Is there a virtual tax man too?

Engaget: “Apple patent embeds thousands of cameras among LCD pixels”. Old news but I hadn’t heard about it till last week.

Jobserve: “The successful candidate will have excellent experience of Web editing/content management within the on-line space and ideally have experience or an understanding of blogging, on-line communities or user generated content”. Oh how new media.

I’m on a Redhat Linux training course all week in the affluent suburb of Guilford. The course has been pretty good so far, maybe a little slow though the pace seemed to be picking up a bit this afternoon. The commute is taking me a little over 2 hours: bus, underground, overland fast train and finally taxi. For such a small place, Guilford sure has a serious congestion problem. I’m not keen on getting up at 5:45 but it does mean I get to catch up on all those podcasts I never get to listen to.

I’ll be at the Gronland Records Showcase tomorrow night at 93 Feet East. It’s the beguining of my effort to go to interesting gigs this summer. Thanks to MK of NYUB for making me remember how much cool music is still out there.

Kyle MacDonald started out just over a year ago with one red paperclip and set himself the challenge of exchanging it for a house, an island or a house on an island. The series of trades he has made so far makes for very interesting reading. What’s also really interesting is that in each case it seems that both parties get something out of the deal. Is there an ebay for trading stuff? That would be pretty cool though not sure how you would make money out of it. Maybe advertising but then advertising is so 1990 these days and I can’t see it really fitting in with the ethos of a site dedicated to swapping. In french bartering stuff is called Troc. What a great word.

If you’ve ever wanted to run Windows, OSX and Linux on a single machine, now you can with Parralels. What is great with Parralels is that as it’s VMware you can have all three running at one. It has to run on the new Intel macs. I wonder what performance is like? At $40 its pretty resonable too.

Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak in Forbes: “Like other professional arbiters of taste, movie reviewers just don’t matter quite as much as they used to. Once upon a time, they were the point of origin for popular opinion. In an age of ratings Web sites and consumer-generated content, they are just one voice of many. Maybe a particularly authoritative voice, but no longer the popes they used to be”.

I wrote a few days back about how great it was that both Imperial College and UCL were suporting RSS. I’ve been reading the feeds for a few days now and though they are great what I really need is to be able to subscribe to certain departments as I am mainly interested in computer science and material science. I’ve sent an email to UCL Computer Science Department requesting they offer their news section as an RSS feed. Lets see what happens.

CNet News: “Linux distributor Red Hat said on Monday that it has signed an agreement to buy open-source company JBoss for at least $350 million”. Check out the Red Hat stock prices [If you are not reading this today then you might see a different graph]. Makes my RHCT and RHCE exams coming up soon even more worth while.

Update: Looks like the Redhat stock price went back down again!

Does anyone know of a good dentist in the Hackney area? I would be eternaly greatfull! I think the time has come for a check up.

Computer Graphics World: “This week, Autodesk launched Autodesk Toxik 2007, the latest version of its collaborative digital compositing software for feature film production”.

The interactive overview of Toxik on Autodesk’s website is pretty cool. You can really get an idea of what the product can offer through the tutorials and demonstrations. Having experienced the world of pain you can get into working on projects where not enough attention has been payed to data management and workflow, I was particluarly impressed with the automation, data tracking and collaborative framework that the software offers.

Collaboration and versioning is implemented using a publishing model which sits ontop of an Oracle relational database. I’ve worked in facitlies with a publishing model built into the infrastrure and it sure makes life a lot easier.

I’ve also heard that they are going to release a 64-bit version on Linux, though I couldn’t find this info anywhere in the specs. I’ve been looking for a 64-bit compositing application for a while now. With a filesystem thats well over 100 Terabytes you really need to be running a 64bit OS just to be able to address it and get maximum performance from 64bit render nodes.

Computer Graphics World has an RSS feed…cool! I wish other vfx and digital cinema sites would get with the program and do the same thing. It makes my life sooooo much easier.

CNet News: “Video upload site YouTube.com has received $8 million in funding from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital”. Still no obvious business model though.

Michael Thompson: “I’ve been doing storage here for six years, and I’ve found that people will use up whatever you put out there. We’ll probably be buying more disks this year”.  I know that feeling. Interesting article about ILM’s computer infrastructure. If you’re into that sort of thing!

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.