February 16, 2005
The Rain
A couple of weeks ago we had the wettest ever day in Melbourne's meteorological recorded history. After it had stopped, we took the kids down to Dight's Falls, on the Yarra which wends its way through the green leafy (aka more expensive) 'burbs down to the city and out into the bay. The normally small drop over the weir was now something else entirely, with kayakers availing themselves of the white water. This has become a vog, Yarra Flood. It is video that I shot of the river, with overlaid text which changes if you mouse into the video (and out again). The commentary is just about the wettest day, and that it seems that, like me, a lot of dads had decided the kids were an excellent excuse to go and see the flood.
In terms of interaction it is simple. Mouse in and out a couple of times to layer the next textual entry over the video. However once you've done this 40 times, which means you're reading the entire commentary for a second time, the movie freezes and won't play anymore. If you click on the video (at any time) it also autojumps you back one second, something I quite like so I'm about to use more of.
Why? I liked the idea of a movie that actually told you to bugger off. That refused to keep moving or working or playing after the user had done something. That simple. The material is quite high bandwidth since there is a lot of visual action going on, so didn't compress as much as usual, here I wanted quite a bit of the visual detail to be preserved.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:01 PM | TrackBack
JITT
Just In Time Teaching. Semester starts Monday. One curriculum updated from its first iteration last year, one brand new second year to deliver. Bit crazy at the moment as a consequence. It is easy to map content, but when I want to develop process and problem based methodologies, then there seems to be more thinking to set up the program. Though to be fair, I reckon there is much less effort required to deliver the program, for much greater learning outcomes. Bit like cooking I guess, figure out what ingredients you have, what they could or ought to be, and then how they should be used. Well, maybe.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:21 PM | TrackBack
Attrition
When you work in a large institution you are subject to highly centralised IT policies. You can understand what happens in such cultures, as their mission is not innovation, research, or teaching, but to ensure that the network is there all the time, works properly, and is not abused. Network integrity.
At my particular university this august group is known as ITS, Information Technology Services. I think the Services part is mock serious. They listen, and they certainly have done well in terms of the blogs my students run (we install them ourselves but they are happy to allow them), but we now have a rather substantial firewall. The Great Firewall.
Now firewalls make sense for all sorts of reasons, but it also means that for such institutions the default point you begin from is to largely shut everything except the obvious, and then possibly open others if and when someone makes a case. Hence I can no longer use my RSS client, ANT (video aggregation), most of the chatter that blogs rely on (pings and the like) is now broken, and I suspect, though haven't had a chance to confirm, that I can no longer video conference using iChatAV. Various software products can no longer check for updates automatically.
Unfortunately, there isn't a single thing in all of this that I can simply point to and say, "see, I can't do my job". Yes, it is really going to stuff up my second year curriculum, yes it seriously hinders my day to day teaching, research, and administration, but in each case the onus is on me, more than ITS, to demonstrate the legitimacy of the task. For example the blogs. We have a similar body, LTS (Learning Technology Services) who provide vast resources for elearning. The question to me is "why don't I just use LTS?", after all, this is their purpose. I can answer that they don't have blogs (ah, "what's wrong with the journal software though?"), everything is firewalled ("does it matter that student work is public, I mean, what if they're writing something they shouldn't?"), and students can't customise and break things as they ought. But from a particular point of view, the problem is with me. It is an argument I need to make, if only because in such an environment innovation becomes stifled, or I could move to the computer science department (kidding) where, like in all universities, institutions like ITS know to leave well alone.
I'm the empowered user here. I can work out what ports I need opened and try and make a case for it. But what about everyone else? Just imagine all the possibilities that will not even be able to present themselves as possibilities because staff can't even see them in the first place (download Skype, just doesn't work because of the firewall, but the average user doesn't know this, so it becomes another example of the 'problem with computers'). It is a bit like not letting some academics have access to particular library shelves, unless you're really really clever at finding that the shelf is actually there.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:18 PM | TrackBack
Adding Chapters to MP3
This Melbourne blog explains how to use ID3V2 tags to add chapters to a MP3 file. Since I work in QuickTime I'd probably do this differently, using a QuickTime chapter track, but I'm not sure how that would affect a podcast in something like iPod.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:27 AM | TrackBack
February 10, 2005
H.264 FAQ
This is Apple's H.264 FAQ. This is next generation MPEG4 codec that will be built into QuickTime 7, and is also adopted as the new DVD codec.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:12 PM | TrackBack
QuickTime 7
There's a brief PR page up at Apple outlining some of the new features in QT 7. The most significant is probably they H.264 codec, which will deliver much higher frame sizes for very low data rates. This will make all those people who mistake videoblogs for TV all the more happier, since now they will be able to publish their work full screen, rather than realising things like blogs work because of their granularity - in all senses. A blog doesn't own your screen or your time. Full screen video owns both. Everything, including time, attention, and screen space, is distributed in the Network.
Having said that, I do like the look of the video postcard tool that integrates with FireWire capture. This is very very useful for vogs, and already is suggesting to me some new possibilties...
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:08 PM | TrackBack
Me.Feedia.Net
Me-TV.com has become mefeedia, a seriously kewl name. It aggregates RSS from videoblogs, and is the brainchild of Peter Van Dijck. Seriously smart.
It lets anyone add feeds, it seems to automatically create an appropriate feed with enclosures if your feed is plain vanilla, and it also has a javascript that produces a vlogroll to insert into your own blog. By semester two when my students are going to be neck deep in this stuff, I've no idea what we'll actually be doing it is developing so quickly.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:17 AM | TrackBack
February 09, 2005
ANT 2
ANT development continues apace with another release today. Not sure when various features have been added but now ANT:
- has a link button that loads the url that any individual video feed is derived from (so the blog entry that the video resides on/in
- allows feeds to be added via the interface (not just the menu)
- allows you to refresh via the interface (not just the menu)
- has a play, previous and next icon in the interface
- allows stopping of a download (command .)
- has a playlist button so the playlist draw toggles
- you can toggle the Feeds drawer from the menu
- allows the toolbar to be customised
- has an applescript that adds podcasts to itunes
- in preferences you can auto check feeds at a nominated time
- set a maximum size for how much video you're going to store
- allows the user to control where videos are placed
Unfortunately this could well define what a videoblog becomes. It is unfortunate since most will just view the feeds, a de facto TV, and not read the text entries nor the blog qua blog which ought to include dates, comments, text, and all the other material texture that makes a blog a blog and not just some video.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:26 PM | TrackBack
February 04, 2005
Lax
No, not LA international airport (where the big jet engines roar), but as in slack. I haven't made any video for a while, so today I just found old footage on the tiBook that I hadn't done anything with and spent 30 minutes making a small piece. Semester starts in a fortnight, I have a lot of new curriculum to develop, another 60 or so blogs to get set up, a wiki to install, things to write and read. Oh, and reviewing abstracts for blogtalk, and trying to start to write some documentation about videoblogging for the new 'how to' site that Jay is getting us all involved in.
The new vog, "In the Driver's Seat", was shot on my now broken Canon ixus still camera. It is from January 2004 when a small picnic in the Botanic Gardens celebrated Anna's return from Europe and Jasper's fifth birthday. It was glorious weather and the kids played a long, complicated game in some trees involving passwords, buttons, climbing and obscure imaginary machinery.
The work is scripted very simply. One sprite was loaded up with the still images, and on the [mouse enter] event the image index for the current sprite was moved by 1, with a maximum of 11 with a wraparound so that once it got to 11 it wraps back to 1. The vog.rmit badge is just a png that I added in a sprite. On this sprite on the [mouse click] event I added a simple goto that loads a url in a new browser window. This links to this entry, but I'm beginning to think that when I split the video and this blog all those years ago it might now make more sense to just fuse the two together again. Anyway, the link to this entry from the badge in the movie is there because now that we're using things like ANT to aggregate video with RSS your video gets viewed in very odd contextless ways, so this embeds a link in the video back to the blog.
The intent of the interaction is very simple. A simple series of statements that relate to what is being shown, they only appear if and when the user mouses into the movie, and they loop. The video continues playing underneath - it could be paused, but why should a work stop just because a user wants to explore? If it does stop, then exploration is not exploration is it? The risk of missing something, of the not seen (the link not visited) is fundamental to the experience of your actions as having consequence. Clicking and having the universe of the work pause for you is not a consequence, unless you enjoy learning how to salivate when a bell sounds.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:32 PM | TrackBack
Learning Spaces
Geoffrey Rockwell has a nice collection of photos and observations about space, learning, and light. My own area might be moving to a renovated building in the next 18 months or so, and Jeremy and I have thought a lot about similar things.
We have proposed that a series of various size rooms, largely glass walled, be distributed throughout the 5 or 6 floors of the new building. These rooms would be research rooms. They can be booked for varying duration (depending on the research activities being undertaken, and the size of the research team), and will be properly resourced. They are flexibile spaces in that they are multiple.
Why glass? Security, those inside can't get up to wrong things, and also can feel safe since others can also make sure that wrong things aren't happening to those in the room. Transparency: so people can see research being done, and ask questions. Space: to give the experience of research as an activity that happens within the space of the institution and not as something that happens 'over there' or 'in there' - ie literally behind closed doors. Access, everyone should be able to see what is being done.
Why scattered throughout the building? Having several means the space is not precious, nor the preserve of an owner. It also makes literal the idea that research is a collaborative, distributed activity. It also means that you serendipitously discover these things as you move through the building. It encourages collaboration.
Of course, it is precisely the sort of thing that will disappear from any budget at the first sign of cost over runs. (We can but try.)
Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:27 PM | TrackBack
Garage Cinema Research
This is a project I saw a few years ago (unless it is different project with the same name? nah) which is out of the Uni of California at Berkeley. From their blurb:
They are doing a lot of research around metadata, capture and editing. A place to get in touch with, and to watch.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:15 PM | TrackBack
February 03, 2005
Blogs and Genre
On the videoblogging list there's been some light discussion about genre. I suspect it is pretty much time to recognise that blogs are not a genre. They might have been, briefly, but not any more. They're a medium (that's medium as in singular of media). A blog is like 'CD', 'book', or 'painting'.
So in CD's we have genres, the really big ones would be things like pop, jazz, rock, classical. But of course each of these can be subdivided into 100s of smaller generic categories. With books we would include fiction, non fiction, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, western, mystery, and so on. With the same ability to further discriminate. We can do the same with painting. In each case we can also identify style, so that in painting a genre might be still life, but it could be fauvist, cubist, late renaissance northern, and so on.
So it is now with blogs. There are multiple genres, each with variable styles. Blogs are now in fact a medium. The first specific medium to have emerged from the World Wide Web http protocol.