dcinput

The Fake Steve Jobs: “I’m a middleman. That’s it. I’m like the guy who runs the record store down the block from you. If the record labels want to ship their records in cement blocks dipped in smallpox, what do I care? As long as the kids want to buy them”. The more things disintermediate, the more they re-intermediate, it would seem.

Ze Frank on procrastination.

Ali McClymont makes awesome London Snowman.

Yahoo Pipes…

I’ve been trying to play around with Yahoo Pipes. This web application that runs in your browser allows you to pull in RSS feeds from around the web and mash them up together in interesting ways. Techcrunch description here.

The GUI looks very nice. What I found interesting is how it seems to be based around similar node and flow metaphors used in many vfx 2D apps like Shake, Fusion and some 3D apps like Houdini. The aim is to allow non-programmers to be able to harness the power of the web.

Whether this will work or not, only time will tell. The apps mentioned above have certainly allowed many non-progrmmers into the world of vfx but this medium is inherantly visual, and since most people have a pair of eyes, there’s an inate understanding. My instinct is that mashing up RSS feeds full of different sorts of non-visual data is going to be way more cerebral and less immediately fun.

The other problem is that since it’s all web based, the Yahoo servers have to take the workload and so far they seem to be going down all the time. In principle though I like the idea. Lets see what happens.

Tickets for the Camden Crawl are on sale. Here’s a video from last year. I love living in Camden.

Hugh Macleod: “These days I’ve started seeing the internet as just a manifestation of something far more primal and ancient […] It’s all about Human Connection. Love. Everything else is secondary”.

8/12/06: Susan Buice: “Feeling connected to the world and to other human experiences is what makes me feel alive and happy. When I don’t feel connected I feel like a meaningless blob of flesh and I want to die”.

Valleywag: “We suspect that companies such as IBM, which have assigned marketing budgets to Second Life, expected to reach corporate decisionmakers, rather than a few fetishists who got lost on their way to the nearest online brothel”.

I agree with Hugh that humans have an inbuilt urge to connect. We want to connect with people in all sorts of ways, we also want to connect ideas in our head together and share these with others. Why did I post the last three links? Because in some way I felt they were all connected. I didn’t start out with the aim to do this, it just kind of ended up that way. I think connection (love?) is how we make sense of things.

Looks like dEUS are starting rehersals for their new album. Most people reading this probably won’t have heard of this band but I grew up listening to them. They helped shape the way I think about music. How great is it that I can subscribe to my favorite band with RSS? How would I have ever seen this otherwise?

I haven’t seen them perform for many years. They say they haven’t played in Antwerp their hometown for over ten years. I saw them play there in the Cartoons Cafe in the summer of 1996, but they were playing under a pseudonym that night. This was while I was working for 3M there, carying out experiments on Post it adhesives, right before I jetted off to London to go to university.

The Belgian alternative rock scene of the nineties - you kind of had to be there to understand. To this day, music in Belgium is really cutting edge. It’s very low key and if you don’t pay attention you could easily miss it. Nevertheless somehwere in between the shadows lies a whole world of massiely creative and talented musicians.

Hey it’s Pukklepop this weekend - another festival from my youth. Wow serriously kick ass lineup this year!

Oh boy. Though it is nice and sunny in Hackney right now, the BBC seems to think that it going to be miserable later. I might need to invest in some waterproof pants before I head up there. On the bright side, at least since yesterday it seems Saturday only has light blue thunder and no rain.

…and as if just to rub it in, Monday and Tuesday are looking fantastic. Thank goodness I’ll be back at work by then.

Snakes on a Plane hits the screens in the US. There’s been so much hype about this film I find it amusing. I worked with some folks that were doing lots of vfx on it a few weeks ago and they were supposed to get me a signed poster. Hmm. Good review here.

Today I am off to Mardid for the week. Check out the HOT weather: 35C/95F everyday!

The Big Chill festival over the weekend was superb. It’s a very different atmosphere to other UK festivals. The crowd tends to be slightly older, in the 25-35 age group and overall it’s busy but with lots and lots of space in this picturesque valley + lakes setting. It’s a lot less grimey than other events I’ve been to - showers on every camp site and lots of posh food. My new favorite festival!

Wimbledon starts today!

This year it seems the officials all have new uniforms. Why do they remind me of Butlins? Also they will be feeding us strawberries with a side order of RSS.

Yesterday’s brunch was fantastic. American pancakes with maple syrup, scrambled eggs with chorizo, eggs benedict and all acompanied by a live piano music. I had the wrong address in yesterday’s post: you will find Aganovich here.

Alistair McClymont is doing nice things with audio and video.

U2 rock the house in second life.

Hollywood Reporter: “George Lucas has Industrial Light + Magic, Peter Jackson has Weta, and now Michael Bay has Digital Domain”.

The BBC is in Second Life: “The BBC has staked a claim to a virtual tropical island where it can stage online music festivals and throw exclusive celebrity parties”.

Skype has announced free landline and mobile calls for people calling within the US and Canada. I wonder what this means for the net neutrality issue. Surely the big telcos aren’t going to like this. Will they start sniffing for VOIP packets? We shall have to wait and see.

Steve Garfield has an amuzingly geeky picture of himself inside second life, inside real life. Far out.

Mark Nelson: “Sony has caved in to the dominance of the iPod and started supporting AAC”.

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.

I’ve been surfing the web for the last few hours with VH2 playing on the box in the background. There’s a show called “100 Songs You Must Download” on, which I guess is on all afternoon. Could you have imagined a show with this name playing on a major music channel a couple of years ago? I guess digital music market is really coming of age.

Frank Gruber analyses the various services that sell online music on TechCrunch in a two part piece. In this first piece he compares pay-per-download services. The next part will look at all you can eat subscription services. The outlook is heavy DRM and an AAC/WMA format war which is bound to end in tears for us users.

Dave Winer: “Instead of thinking of “user generated content” think of the Internet as an idea processor, and you’ll be much closer to the power of what’s going on”.

I’m always looking for different ways of looking at the internet and I like this one. Depending on who you are and what you do the internet can seem like very different things, and it changes over time.

When I first started going online in the early nineties I was pretty impressed but I soon got bored as I realised that really the internet was just a glorified catalogue. Websites were static and they just tended to show you things. You couldn’t really interact. I’m sure there were interesting things going on in the web then but I just wasn’t aware of them.

The web today is a very different place. People of all walks of life all around the globe are able to interact in so many different ways, share things, create things, do business and more. Its incredible that the web has so far met everyone’s needs. The pace of change is accelerating rapidly and the boundaries of what the web is are being pushed in ever more directions. The whole net neutrality issue is somehow related to this. Will the web continue to evolve as something for everyone? It’s an important question.

The web as storage in the clouds: Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Services.

Great audio interview by Dr Jobbs with Amazon’s Adam Selipsky about the new S3 service. I’m starting to see the big deal with this thing. I’m also starting to get some really good ideas for new projects. When you don’t have to worry about storage things could get a lot more fun for developers.

Looks like the Da Vinci Code will get released after all as Dan Brown wins his case at the High Court in the UK. Any publicity is good publicity.
NYTimes: “The authors of ‘Holy Blood’, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, had failed in their effort to prove that Mr. Brown had stolen their ‘central theme’ because they could not accurately state what that theme was”.

Rushi has compiled a great list of links for AJAX newbies and its kind of geared towards PHP programmers. Just what I was looking for.

Techdirt: Universal Pictures are trying to beat dvd counterfeiters at their own game in Russia by selling “cheap ‘n early” dvds at lower cost and quality.

I missed this post on Cinematical last weekend about the upcomming Shrek spin off “Puss in Boots”. I had wondered what had happened to this idea. While I was working at the Creature Shop last year I had a load of fun doing some motion capture tests for this. Due to the fact that cats have weird back legs that bend the wrong way, the physical department, which built the animatronics, had made a special Puss in Boots exoskeleton that a human wore and to which the motion capture sensors were attached. In this way the motion data that was captured would look like it was from a walking cat.

I ended up doing the initial testing for the exoskeleton as I was about the right size and had to prance about the studio with a pretend sword. When it came down to the actual motion capture shoot they got someone else in but I did get to try on the Honey Monster outfit that day too. Brings back such good memories.

Complete coincidence but I’m going to a reunion lunch of the Creature Shop engineering team tomorrow which should be interesting. Damn it’s such a shame that the place closed down.

BBC News: “Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for new .eu domain name since it became available to the public on Friday”. Damn it some person with my name got the one I wanted. Imposter!

BBC News: “Digital download-to-own is the new holy grail of the film and TV industry as it fights to respond to the twin challenges of piracy and new market entrants”…”However, the consumer must be at the centre of all new strategies and DRM systems that are not sufficiently flexible are doomed to failure”.

Sometimes time sure does fly. I missed out on blogging some real interesting stuff the last couple of days due to an insanely busy work schedule. That really bums me out.

Its been a really interesting week for all things digital. Here in the UK for the first time ever a single has made it to number one based on digital downloads alone. Think about it for a second, they’ve got a number one and they haven’t actually made anything that you can physically hold in your hand. Far out.

BBC News: “US hip-hop duo Gnarls Barkley have become the first act to score a UK number one single on the strength of digital sales alone”

One of the interesting things is a massive shift in how the charts are formed. The charts for the last ten years have, for the most part, been defined by what singles teenagers are buying from the shops. With downloads playing a major role, the demographics of chart influence is moving to the 20-30 year olds. IMHO this can only be a good thing for music. But then I would say that wouldn’t I…

The other major news in the world of digital was the announcement that six major studios are clubbing together to sell movie downloads that you can keep.

NYTimes: “The studios are caught between a rock and a hard place”…”If they don’t make movies available electronically, piracy will get them. But they simultaneously have to take care of their brick-and-mortar customers. If the chain stores became angered”…”they might pull back from their heavy promotion of DVD’s”.

Lots of interesting chatter on the blogosphere about the development as the news makes the top of memeorandum.

Great piece by Scott Kirsner on CinemaTech - thats where I heard about it first. One of the best places for anything d-cinema related.

For the most part people are complaining about how rubbish the service is going to be: expensive and heavily DRMed. What people are missing is that this is really just the first step. The studios are just starting to “get the internet” but are treading very cautiously, and for good reason. The prices will come down, the market will see to that, in the end it’s just way cheaper to not actually have to physically make anything.

With companies like Amazon and Apple trying to secure deals with Hollywood this has the potential to drastically change things: jobs will be lost and companies without internet presence will go under. It’s going to be a roller coaster ride from here on in.

Dave Winer thinks that NPR are figuring out how to make money on the internet. The article of his on the fundamental law to making money on the internet (version 3) that he links to makes for interesting reading.

Damn I love the OPML Editor for blogging but it sucks so hard that when you switch to the normal Wordpress interface then back the the OPML Editor that all the work you did gets deleted. All the picks I uploaded just disapeared. Grrr. Now I have to put them back again.

Where does all the time go? I need a time machine. It’s nearly midnight and I have a few PHP/MySQL tutorials to get through before bed…in the end the master plan will come together it’s just sometimes juggling work, professional exams, personal projects and eating good pizza can leave you a bit thinly spread.

The best pizza in London town is the Furnace and you sure better had the pizza Porchetta its just so great. Mmmm.

I really should change my blogroll. I mean who are these guys? Matt, Donncha, Dougal. I sure don’t know.