I spent Saturday with Clo at IBC 2006 (Amsterdam), an exhibition about content creation, management and delivery. As boring as that may sound, we did see some neat stuff.
HARDWARE
First of all, IBC is a paradise for hardware freaks. I’ve never seen so many 30″ plus flat screen displays on such a limited surface. One vendor combined 6 of those into one impressive control room. Accenture was showing off a huge touchscreen display for geo-applications, which reminded of Minory Report. Apple had dropped off several truckloads of equipment, including a full XServe RAID rack which probably packed more than 30 Terabytes. A nice rack to look at.
There are camera support cranes and extensible poles up to 15m high. We saw a lot of steadycam demos, and one guy did a steadycam demo that was some mix between martial arts and ballet.
All vendors of blue screen/green screen solutions for broadcast purposes showed of their equipment with one or more blond girls. Must be the best hair colour for blue screen effects.
Continue reading ‘IBC Amsterdam: bigger, better, faster’
Published on
September 12, 2006 in
webdev.
If you want to embed one of your own Flickr pictures into your blog, the Flickr photo page gives you the HTML code for easy copy/paste. They require you to link back to the photo page, so obviously in the HTML they provide, they give your an image with a link, i.e. an <img> tag in between a <a> </a> anchor tag pair. A typical example:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/(...)" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/(...).jpg" width="600" height="1200" alt="(image title)" /></a>
As you can see, they combine both an anchor title (always “Photo Sharing”) with an image alt text (Flickr uses the photo title for that). Both fields give more info about the objects they refer to and are very much loved by search engines. It should come as no surprise that the #1 Google result for “photo sharing” is Flickr.
Continue reading ‘Flickr: combining ALT and TITLE for images’
Published on
September 12, 2006 in
internet.
A while back I bought the whole suite of Edward Tufte books: “The visual display of quantitative data“, “Envisioning Information” and “Visual Explanations“.
Today my copy of “Beautiful evidence” arrived in the mail. Actually a Belgian Post employee came to drop it off, because I had to pay 10 euro douane/customs. For a book of $52, that is an unpleasant extra 25%.
The legislation that was printed on the back of the receipt states that any item from outside the EU, with a value higher than 22 euro, or not conform to ’small letter mail of non-commercial kind’ (up to 45 euro), or containing goods from outside the EU should be presented to customs. Standard fee: 10 euro. I have just ordered a t-shirt from SomaFM ($50), I wonder what customs will think of that.
Continue reading ‘More globalisation, please’
The day is coming closer: Barcamp Brussels II on Sunday Sept 24th!!
Some concrete info:
- breakfast starts at 09H00. The actual speeches start around 10h, and end around 18h.
- the event takes place at the SAP Lounge (at Arsenal, next to VUB)
- there are 4 simultaneous tracks in separate rooms (20-30 persons each)
- DEVELOPERS TRACK
- for those who write it
- USERS TRACK
- for those who use it
- KNOWLEDGE TRACK
- for those who plan it
- MEDIA TRACK
- for those who sell it
- all presentations should be 10 minutes long (i.e. “Elevator pitch” style). That leaves 5 minutes for Q&A and 5 minutes to swap rooms. 10 minutes is short? Yes it is! The goal is not to show your thorough knowledge of a topic, but to show people what you are doing and if they’re interested, they’ll find you for more info!
- all presentations are in English. There will be an international crowd, and a priori the ‘de facto lingua franca’ is
Latin English, res ipsa loquitur.
Those who still want to participate:
- put your name on the Barcamp Brussels attendee list (we’re already around 70 names!)
- put your 10-minute topic on the Barcamp II topics page
- prepare your presentation: focus on the important stuff, don’t go
in too much detail and practise iot. 10 minutes is really short, and
you will be stopped when your time is up, so that we can keep the four
simultaneous tracks synchronized.
- show up and have fun
(from barcamp.forret.com)
I wrote a post last year “REQ: Live mashup performance tool” on how much fun it would be to be able to do live mashups: mix basslines, drums, guiter riffs and vocals from different songs in real-time. I just found out via beatmixed that there is a New-York DJ that has figured out the nuts and bolts: Toto a.k.a. Moldover.
MOLDOVER SETUP
- HARDWARE: He uses a PC laptop with Ableton Live (for loop control) and Native Instruments Reaktor (for sound FX). As MIDI-controller, he uses a Novation ReMOTE 25 (2 octaves). For audio output he uses an Echo Audio Indigo » io CardBus interface.
- SOFTWARE: he has organized an extensive collection of loops in Live into 8 columns or channels – I think “DJ1″, “DJ2″, “Beats”, “Percussion”, “Melody”, “Bass”, “Ambient” and “Vocals”. Loops are color-coded for the key they’re in (if any). Each channel has 1 FX configured which is the Reaktor plugin. There are also some effects on the master output (limiter, compressor, …)
- CONTROL: he uses the 8 white keys at the right to trigger each channel. The 8 sliders, which are nicely lined up right above the keys, control the volume of each channel. The 2 x 8 knobs control 2 FX settings per channel. On some channels these are equalizer settings (cut-off frequency), on others delay/reverb settings (depends on the type of ‘content’ of each channel, and what FX go best with that).
See him at work on this Youtube video:
Continue reading ‘Moldover: Live mashup DJ’
Published on
September 6, 2006 in
tool.
I’ve just finished a tool to make web page mockups. The purpose: make a quick draft of what a web page should look like, so you can include a screen shot in an email or a specifications document. When a client describes what page layout he wants in pure text, it is easy to misunderstand what he means. E.g. “two levels of menu should be visible on each page“. Ok, you want those as a bullet list in the side bar or a breadcrumb on top? It’s easier to just show him an overview of: that block goes there, that’s what I mean with two sidebars on the right, the tags are here at the right, under the recent comments.
My web page designer will let you specify headers, footers, sidebars and let you add bogus content with an easy markup syntax. [text becomes a block of text, *text becomes a bullet, _text is a link … The goal is that anyone, without any knowledge of HTML, can make a rudimentary page layout and say: see that’s what I want. I also generate ‘pretty’ URLs in the RubyOnRails syntax (list/edit/new/…).
It’s helped me, it might help you! Any remarks are welcome!
Published on
September 1, 2006 in
Google.
Come on, I can understand Sourceforge needs the Adsense revenue, but this is going too far. A huge 450 x 400 blue advertisement is blocking access to most download links on a Sourceforge download page, and there is no way to make it disappear, no [X] button in the top right or a “hide this” link.
The biggest square ads I can see in the Adsense overview page are 336 x 280 (”large rectangle”), so this must be some kind of special ad. It renders the page virtually useless. Drop it, already.
BTW: more flexible screwing, anyone?
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