Monthly Archive for September, 2006

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IBC Amsterdam: bigger, better, faster

Published on September 14, 2006 in technology. Closed

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
IBC: AccentureFirst 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.
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Flickr: combining ALT and TITLE for images

Published on September 12, 2006 in webdev. 1 Comment

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.
Flickr: img alt vs. a title
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More globalisation, please

Published on September 12, 2006 in internet. 2 Comments

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%.

Beautiful Evidence: by Edward Tufte

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.

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Barcamp Brussels is approaching!

Published on September 11, 2006 in barcamp and Brussel. Closed

The day is coming closer: Barcamp Brussels II on Sunday Sept 24th!!

Some concrete info:

SAP Lounge

  • 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:

  1. put your name on the Barcamp Brussels attendee list (we’re already around 70 names!)
  2. put your 10-minute topic on the Barcamp II topics page
  3. 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.
  4. show up and have fun

(from barcamp.forret.com)