Aehso’s Output

This just blows me away - grab Democracy from the folks at the Participatory Culture Foundation, browse the various RSS feeds and end up watching content like this or this (yes, Democracy loads torrents too).  Then check out their sister site Video Bomb and if have your own content set up a Broadcast Machine or your own.

Awesome stuff, with quality free software and content like this, who needs broadcast TV?

The Register ran a “SOA - Beyond the Hype“ survey back in May and they have just published the results - they changed the tag line for the report to “SOA: Insights from the Front Line” for some reason (download the research report PDF). 

The questions were quite high level and so the results are equally woolly.  One trend in the results is that the self-proclaimed experts seem to be quite sure of what they are doing but the ‘others’ are not.  Hmm, stating the obvious perhaps?  A far more interesting question, the degree to which the experts agree with one another, was not tackled.   El Reg seems to have a pretty well informed reader base so I’m sure there is something useful in there somewhere for someone. 

The report was sponsered by IBM yet it doesn’t any WebSphere offerings (or any other vendor’s product for that matter).  Poor value for money Big Blue!  (It doesn’t mention ESBs or SCA either).

Excellent, Elgato have released an EyeTV 2.3 update that adds a full 10-foot user interface. And it can be controlled using the Apple Remote just like Front Row. It’s not quote TIVO yet but it’s a huge step forward - kudos to Elgato for listening to their users!

I’m now that close to buying a Logitech Harmony remote for my living room - the Apple Remote is cute but the 6-button design is slightly too minimalist to control a Mac mini based HTPC (and control a Philips Cineos TV and a NTL STB). The only blocker at the moment is this damn NTL DVB-C STB (a Pace Micro DC221. Two problems:

• It uses an odd IrDA based infra-red signal protocol that most learning remotes cannot transmit. Red-Eye solves this problem with a “translator” and the same guys also have a Red-Eye Serial that specifically mentions support for the DC221.
• There doesn’t seem to be much/any support in EyeTV for changing channels on the external digital STB. I did find a tool called EyeCaptain that does support mapping external channels to the EyeTV composite or S-Video input but it doesn’t say anything about controlling the current external channel.

Of course if NTL would just let me use my own DVB-C receiver then I’d be give them back their Pace box, and all my problems would go away. All I can say is roll on the arrival of DTT in Ireland (yes, I know, I’m not holding my breath)…

The electric sheep screen saver (for Win, OS X & Linux) is one of those strange concepts that begs the question: ‘who creates this stuff???’ It is amazingly cool:

…the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

The generated visuals are usually spectacular and it is minimally interactive to allow us meatspace inhabitants to judge the output:

If you see a sheep you like, hit the “up arrow” key on your keyboard. A smiley face will temporarily appear. Conversely, if you see one you dislike, press the “down arrow”. You have voted for that sheep and contributed to its genetic destiny. Popular sheep will live
longer and procreate.

Of course, your machine could also run one of many more noble distributed computing screen savers…

(The one question that they don’t answer well in the FAQ is what the typical daily bandwidth usage is…hmmm)

(from themovieblog.com via darrenbarefoot.com)

Two “search the Irish corner of the web” sites worth noting:

• Scrúdú - an Irish search engine (supposedly launching in June - errr)
• Gimmiedat - an Irish web site directory

Both could be stressing the “local to the island of Ireland” aspect of their results which I think is a missed opportunity. Something like a real up front assurance that they don’t contain advertisements for irrelevant stateside commercial websites, that type of thing. Hopefully they will - anything that helps ween ordinary web users away from using the “pages from Ireland” option on google.ie can only be a good thing. I cannot count the number of times that my girlfriend/mum/sisters/brothers have asked me about international commercial websites they found by sticking something like “hotel” into that bloody search box and then clicking on one of the many “sponsored links” that infest the results page. Even the old Yahoo! Directory (Ireland) is safer!

Reality check: ordinary web users, the ones that barely know how to use Office and read their email, do not know the difference between an organic result link and a sponsored link. Until the misdirection (and quasi-fraud) by the search engine companies is cleaned up I for one am forwarding family and friends to local directories and revoking my Google-search-related-technical-support-services. Sentences beginning with “I found this on Google…” will fall on deaf ears.