Category Archives: Internet

Panic Coda

Panic Inc have just released their new Mac application, Coda. This came to our attention initially because we’re also developing something called CODA, albeit in a very different space. Pity, but there are lots of other codas out there (codi? codae?), so I guess there’s room for us all!

Anyway, I had a bit of a play with Panic’s app last night and it’s very cute. Panic are the guys who make Transmit, widely acknowledged as the best FTP app for the Mac, or, it is generally agreed, for any platform. So new products are watched with interest.

CODA is an editor for web developers. It’s not a Dreamweaver or anything like that, but for those (like me) who want to write HTML and CSS directly, it’s a very nice package. When you open a ‘site’ you get tabs for source editing, CSS editing, preview, and an SSH terminal, all with file access provided by their FTP/SFTP/Webdav engine.

Panic Coda

This sounds like the dreaded Swiss-Army-knife approach and could be a complex mess, but the creators have drawn it all together in a seamless and exceedingly elegant package, that I find rather tempting…

Here, and here are a couple of reviews if you want more details and some screenshots.

YouTube pulls ABC videos… unnecessarily

Life for IP lawyers is never dull. Or always dull, I guess…

Perth (Australia) – A teenager managed to outsmart YouTube by sending DMCA notice that forced the video sharing giant to take down hundreds of videos. The 15-year-old Perth boy pretended to be with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and requested that clips from the show “The Chaser’s War on Everything” be removed. YouTube complied and many of those videos are still offline.

YouTube’s lawyers tracked down the boy who has since confessed and apologized for his misdeeds. The interesting part is that the broadcasting company didn’t have any problem with the YouTube clips and its executives actually encourage clips to be shared.

from tgdaily

The new debating medium

Once upon a time, those who wished to conduct vigorous debate would send letters to the Editor. Now, everything is much more sophisticated. Let me explain…

First, many thanks to CD Happel for pointing me at this great video of a juggling demonstration by Chris Bliss. It’s impressive – watch and enjoy.

Update 2012 – Google Video has now gone: You can watch it here instead.

However, another juggling enthusiast, Jason Garfield, pointed out that technically, Chris’s act is not so complicated. Simply posting this to a blog wouldn’t have had much impact, though, so he made a video of himself juggling to the same music but with five balls instead of three. You can see it here. It became known (or was christened by him) as the ‘Bliss Diss’ video. Also very impressive, but in different ways.

This apparently caused some debate in the juggling community about which was really the most difficult routine and whether Chris’s choreography was better than Jason’s. Jason got so much email – often vitriolic – that he decided to post another video explaining his position. In it he shows Chris’s video with multiple different background tracks, to show that it appears to be nicely choreographed with any of them.

Now, as someone who could barely juggle two balls to ‘Baa baa black sheep’, I am not qualified to make any assessment of the juggling technicalities. I suspect Jason is probably right, but his message has come over as rather negative so I, like many others, instinctively react against it after getting such a postitive vibe from Chris’s video above.

What interested me, however, was his his use of the media. He stated that he wouldn’t read any more of the aggressive email he was getting. If you want to send him a message, sit in front of a video camera and send him a clip explaining, or demonstrating, your position. We’ve all seen the ‘flame wars’ where people engage in heated arguments on forums or in email that would presumably never have become so vicious in a face-to-face encounter. I think Jason may have hit upon an excellent way of keeping things more civil. Have a look at his explanation.

It’s also interesting that we’ve reached a point where it’s reasonable to request anybody feeling strongly about a subject to make a video of themselves talking about it and broadcast it globally – something that would be unthinkable just a few years ago. Much of the population of the developed world now carry in their pockets the technology needed to do just that.

That’s even more amazing than the juggling.

Twitter

Your Status-Q quote for the day comes from Norman Lewis’s eTel talk:

The search for acknowledgement is the key to most online activity.

Yesterday I signed up for a Twitter account, to see what all the fuss was about. I was more interested in it as a social phenomenon than because I actually wanted to use it. Which probably indicates that I’m getting old.

For those who don’t know it, Twitter is all the rage amongst the youth of today. You can type out a few words saying what you’re currently doing, and anyone interested in watching can keep up to date with your exciting life. Twitter is to instant messaging what blogging is to email; it’s chiefly a broadcasting mechanism rather than a conversation. This is very convenient for the youth of today, who would otherwise need to send the same updates to their 15 simultaneous IM conversations.

You can send Twitter updates using your mobile, via the web, using an IM client, or a dedicated application, and you can keep track of your friends in a variety of ways including via RSS.

To clarify things, here’s the ‘History of blogging’:

History of blogging

(Many thanks to Dave Briggs, who found this on Mashable.)

Call me

Quote of the day comes from Stephen Uhler of Sun, who, in his talk at eTel, said:

Cellphones have reduced peoples’ expectation of the phone system to the point where VoIP is now viable.

He’s quite right – it wasn’t that long ago that you would have been very surprised, upset even, if a phone call were just to hang up unexpectedly…

Now, as a friend and I once discussed, there’s a problem. We need a new social convention. When the line drops, who should re-initiate the call? The person who made the call in the first place? The person with the cheapest outgoing charges?

We decided that it was probably the person who was on the move, assuming at least one party was mobile. Because they’re the ones who will know when they’re back in a good coverage area.

Of course, we also realised that in an ideal world the service provider, or the phone, would do this for you.

“Press 1 to have the call reconnect automatically when possible…”

Europe’s feeling foxy

The Firefox browser continues to gain popularity in Europe, with a market share of just over 23%, according to research done by a French firm and reported in The Inquirer.

We in the Royaume Uni are a little behind some of our neighbours at 15.8%, while Slovenia has adopted Firefox to a whole-hearted level of over 40%.

Phonecasting

Some questions for you:

  • How often do you use the speakerphone facility on your mobile? If you’re like me, only very occasionally.
  • How often do you get the urge to listen to music through the (probably mono) speaker or headset on your mobile? Again, I would suggest, probably not often. Even the cheapest iPod will do a much better job.
  • How often, when listening to podcasts while shaving, do you wish that your iPod had built-in speakers so you don’t have to keep plugging it into those speakers with the battery that runs down and makes Leo Laporte sound like a dalek? Well, there may be fewer of you here, but I’m sure you can at least sympathise with those of us for whom this is a source of distress.

So I’m quite intrigued by the new software that I’ve just installed on my Nokia E61: Nokia’s Podcasting application. This is not, as the name might suggest, something that lets you create podcasts on the phone, but something that lets you subscribe to, download and listen to them. And the phone’s audio, limited and monophonic though it may be, is just fine for most podcasts, either through earphone or through the loudspeaker – speech is what it was designed for, after all!

This would also be a good way to generate phenomenally large phone bills if I were charged per megabyte for my 3G connection, or if I couldn’t set the phone to do the downloads via my wifi connection. And I’ll have to watch my settings carefully. My real worry is that I’ll accidentally go abroad and the application will download the latest episode of TWiT over a roaming GSM connection, which would, I calculate, cost me something in the region of £280.

Still not quite foxy enough

Firefox 2 is out. Can’t say I really notice much difference, but I thought 1.5 was just fine, so I’m not upset.

On the Mac, though, it still doesn’t deal with RSS feeds as nicely as Safari, so it won’t quite displace my default browser yet.

Mobile network neutrality?

The core of the network neutrality debate is whether the people providing the ‘pipes’ – telecoms operators, in general – should be able to charge the big online companies, the Googles & Yahoos, for delivery of their content. If Youtube wants smooth playback of their videos on your screen, they may have to pay your broadband provider for a special quality of service.

Much of the controversy comes because this violates the ‘end-to-end principle’ which made the internet successful in the first place: the fact that you gave the network some data, and it did its best to deliver it, without any reference to what that data might actualy contain. Much of the innovation around the internet has only been possible because of this. Skype could not have become Skype if it had needed to ask permission from the network operators. The telecoms companies are now, partly because of the outcry, claiming that they’re really talking about better delivery of new services, not about restrictions on existing ones, but many people see this as a slippery slope to a bad place.

This week’s Economist has a good section on telecoms convergence, and I particularly liked this comment by Andrew Odlyzko:

The telecoms firms could even find that the boot is on the other foot, says Mr Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota. Referring to companies such as AT&T and Verizon, he asks: “What makes them think that they are going to charge Google, as opposed to Google charging them?” Cable companies, he points out, have to pay for the television shows and films they deliver over their networks.

It’s a good point. I’m lucky in that it would be fairly easy for me to switch broadband provider, and one thing that would make me do so very quickly would be if my current provider became unable to deliver Google’s services.

In the mobile world, of course, changing provider can be rather easier. My new T-Mobile 3G connection, for example, allows me almost unlimited data but includes a specific clause that allows them to downgrade my data connection if the use of VOIP protocols is detected. They offer a noticeably more expensive connection that doesn’t include this restriction.

Interesting…

Convergence

Well, this post comes via a 3G network, using my Nokia E61.

I’ll write more about this device soon. It does so much more than my Blackberry – better sound, wifi connectivity, VOIP calls, lovely big screen and pretty decent keyboard, to name a few – but some aspects are noticeably more flaky or obscure.

I had my Blackberry up & running and doing what I wanted very quickly, whereas I’ve been playing with this device all weekend and still haven’t quite got it as I want it. But that’s partly because there is so much more you can do with this… I didn’t spend much time configuring my BB to connect to my Asterisk server via wifi, for example! But the BB is basically an enhanced phone, where this is a very capable PDA, almost a tiny laptop, with a whole new operating system to learn – Symbian, in this case, which I’m much happier to have on my phone than anything from Redmond.

The main reason I wanted to try the E61 was to get 3G connectivity for my laptop, and it does that very nicely. It’s also better for doing blog posts from the breakfast table!
But for general ease of use, it’s hard to beat a Blackberry.

Public enemy no. 1?

David Linhardt, a notorious Chicago-based spammer, is suing the anti-spam organisation Spamhaus for nearly $12M in lost earnings.

This is ridiculous enough, but his suit is made more complicated by the fact that Spamhaus is based in the UK. Hurrah!

Now, however, thwarted by the fact that the UK seems to be outside the jurisdiction of the Illinois courts, it seems that Linhardt is trying a new tactic. Mmm. How to win friends and influence people in the 21st century…

ScanR – image services by email

ScanR is a lovely service. Take a picture of a document, whiteboard or business card with your digital camera or mobile phone. Email it to ScanR:

  • to wb@scanr.com if it’s a whiteboard image – you’ll get back a nice clean PDF version
  • to doc@scanr.com if a document – you get back a clean PDF that has supposedly been OCRed – the OCR didn’t really work for me, though the image was good.
  • to bc@scanr.com if it’s a business card, and you get back not just an image but a .vcf file as well, which you can just double-click to put into your address book. On the card I tried, the text was OCRed perfectly but not put into the correct fields – however, all the data was there in the comments section, so I could find the card by searching for any of it, and copy and paste it into the right fields if wanted.

The nice thing, of course, is that you can do all of this directly from your phone. If you have a phone with a camera in it, which at present I don’t…

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser