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An interesting article “Why TV on demand insists you use its chosen browser” by Kate Bevan in today’s TechnologyGuardian indicates that it is not only the BBC that has wedded itself to a Microsoft Windows XP/IE/Media Player solution to its Video on Demand (VOD) service. Apparently Channel 4’s 40D service has the same limitations, and I can report first hand that SKY Anytime doesn’t work on Vista either. Apparently it’s all a question of reaching the most users while satisfying the distribution restrictions of the rights holders.

There’s an additional issue that I found with Sky Anytime and that is the DRM is tied to the CPU, so make sure that you install it on a Windows XP that you don’t intend to upgrade to Vista. I upgraded my laptop, but even after uninstalling the software (which no longer worked) I couldn’t reinstall on another PC because my account was still tied to the Laptop! A long call to Customer Services is likely to be the only solution. Note to the developers: “Why can’t uninstalling reset the link to the CPU that is no longer running the software?”

In my pursuit of procrastination (I’m supposed to be writing supplementary [summer resit] examinations) I’ve been through my feeds and am now watching Stephanie Booth’s excellent Google Tech Talk on Localization (which incidentally is a trickier problem than most English speakers realise). Whilst listening, I was following the links to Stephanie’s blog Climb to the Stars and from there to her del.icio.us link collection and discovered a useful tip. She bookmarks links to the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) record for the films that she’s seen and tags them films seen cinema , films seen dvd, etc. What an elegant, great, simply superb, absurdly simple idea! Ideal for the completist who must make sure that he’s seen every one of the 1000 films to see before you die before he dies. And it’s so easily adapted to books, recordings, rugby matches or anything else you’d want to remember.

Oh … and Stephanie’s talk on the issues of localization for web application developers is also thought provoking and well worth watching.

You may have heard about the BBC’s plans to release iPlayer which will allow license fee payers to watch BBC programs on their computers. Unfortunately, the system is targeted at Windows and uses Microsoft Media Player and Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect the content. While the use of some form of DRM to protect the content seems to me eminently sensible (I don’t see how the BBC, which outsources most of its production, could offer any form of Video on Demand (VOD) without protecting the Artistic Property of itself and its partners), the choice of Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Media Player and Microsoft DRM does potentially disenfranchise a small but significant minority of computer users. If you are running any version of Linux, Macintosh or even Windows Vista, iPlayer will not work for you. The community of the disenfranchised have created a petition on the Prime Minister’s e-petition site

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to prevent the BBC from making its iPlayer on-demand television service available to Windows users only, and instruct the corporation to provide its service for other operating systems also.

If you care, go to the petition page and sign it yourself! The deadline is 20 August 2007 and at the time of blogging, there were 9,635 signatories.

In a knowing echo to Edward R. Murrow’s indictment of Senator Joe McCarthy (recently immortalized in George Clooney’s film film), Keith Olbermann has used the closing of his eve-of-July 4thMSNBC Countdown program (link includes video) to publicly castigate the current President and Vice President of the United States – suggesting that they both resign. To paraphrase the tag line:

“I didn’t vote for him,” [John Wayne referring to JFK] once said, “But he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

That—on this eve of the 4th of July—is the essence of [U.S.] democracy, in 17 words. And that is what President Bush threw away yesterday in commuting the sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Powerful stuff! Thanks for SassyBlonde for bringing this to my attention!

Tom Johnson strkes a chord with his latest blog posting on i’d rather be writing wherein he talks about moving from desktop to online tools. Here’s his list which of tools, many of which I find I am already using (but not exclusively yet): - Instead of Microsoft Outlook, use Gmail. - Instead of FeedDemon, use Google Reader. - Instead of Microsoft Word, use Google Docs and Spreadsheets (if only!). - Instead of to-do lists and other notes stored on Word documents, use Mediawiki Todoist and Dokuwiki. TiddlyWiki is also good! - Instead of a journal that you keep on your desktop, use WordPressBlogger. - Instead of adding favorites to IE, use Del.icio.us. - Instead of storing documents in folders, store them in a file directory on a Web host. This would be a good thing to do but which? - Instead of keeping photos in folders, use Flickr (you’ll need to pay if you have a lot!).

Interesting comment from Jo which I’m afraid I have some sympathy for: > […] as for Google as an operating system, it has other potential as well. Last year my university traded WebCT for Blackboard, a course management system so heinous that I spent last spring teaching a course using only Google tools (especially Google Groups and Google docs). Now if I could only wangle a sabbatical with Google to help them move into the higher-ed market…

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I’ve been reading a lot recently about Yahoo! Pipes so I thought I’d give it a try myself. I created a simple feed aggregator by merging the RSS feeds for my Google reader starred items, del.icio.us, and the RSS feed for this blog together and output as a new feed.

I had to do some minor manipulation, for example to remove duplicates (which you get when you star, bookmark or link-blog the same item) and to sort the merged feeds into descending order of publication date. Then I took the output of the resulting feed and added it to my iGoogle page. The result is a nice summary of my recent activities.

This was a very quick experiment, and I’m sure there’s a lot more that you can do: for example, only the link title and URL is captured, not the text, nor any multimedia content. But it’s very easy to use and worthy of further experimentation.

Comments:¶

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gbswales - May 4, 2010

Well my experience as a child was one of hating maths - all that "chalk and theory" - when I had to visit maths again as part of my BSc I looked forward to being taught in a more imaginative way that might capture my interest - it turned out to be delivered by a lecturer using the same chalk and theory method (not to mention almost illegible handwritten photocopied notes). If anything I was even more turned off than the first time despite the 45 years of "progress" inbetween the two experiences. I once saw a more enlightened teacher presenting a lesson about fractions to primary kids - she spent most of the lesson discussing what fruit they liked and how they could share the fruit they collectively chose with their friends....the math bit came in the last few minutes of the teaching session but I am sure that the kids learnt more about fractions. Now I am not suggesting you get secondary kids cutting up bananas but I do think that starting any lesson from a practical illustration about why you might want to understand it is a good way to grab interest and attention - who is ever inspired by "you need to understand the basics before we move onto more interesting stuff"

In a follow-up to his blog article on Digital Media (reported in my article about serendipity), OU Educational Technologist Tony Hirst has used the web 2.0 site SplashCast to mash up a presentation with the cited videos. Here’s Tony’s blog article, and here is the presentation. The end result serves both as an interesting introduction to the educational possibilities of digital media and an interesting case study of what can be done with access to video sharing sites and the web.¶

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Chris Hall - May 3, 2010

Gloomy stuff but I'm afraid I agree with you. The campaign has all been a bit too media driven with very little real debate about what any of the parties actually plan to do.

Seen in today’s Guardian is news of the impending July 27th release of the BBC’s new content-on-demand iPlayer. Unfortunately, acording to the article and Guardian blogger Bobbie Johnson, it won’t run on Vista which adds it to a growing list of essential software (which includes Quicktime and iTunes) which won’t run on my newly upgraded laptop. Still, we still have XP on the computer at home so next time we miss an episode of Dalziel and Pascoe because of a recording clash on the Sky+ box, all will not be lost!

It’s not technology related, but the arrival of new Gordon Brown as new PM, ought to be marked somehow, even if a day late! My personal Brown story: I was once within three feet of Gordon in the ticket hall of the Paddington Station underground. He was in the opposition then, so got around using public transport. I don’t suppose he’d remember me.

(image originally published on the BBC news web site.)

So we’re all agreed. Blogs: good; email: bad. Wikis: good; sending round attachments to a dozen people and then having to merge all the changes by hand afterwards: bad.

This one goes out to all my colleagues who really do want to send out attachments by email and merge changes manually. (No, I tell a lie, they want to send out printouts of documents and merge red-lined versions back into the electronic documents manually!) Here’s a presentation by Suw Charman (note no Powerpoint!!) recorded at Google HQ and released in the Google TechTalks series that spells out the barriers to social tools and why it might be good to embrace change. This is why I live my life on the web: welcome to my world!
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=5259885968345773781&hl=en
(Note: video is 55 minutes long, so lock the door, take the phone off the hook and grab a coffee before hitting play.)

Also discovered¶

• Suw’s friend Stephanie Booth has blogged a summary of the presentation for those of you who haven’t got fifty-five minutes to spare.
• Stephanie Booth and Suw Charman discuss “Are PowerPoint Slides Evil?” in a Video Blog on Fresh Lime Soda.

Related¶

New blog entry on the Learning Lab is a related item about using Google docs for collaborative writing. This might actually work for us!