dcinput

Yesterday’s trip down to see the 2007 NaVloPoMo screening inspired me to start cutting up video. So many unbelievable pieces of work were shown and it was really great meeting many people that I’d only ever seen online.

The audio is from the start of nyub episode #50, a fantastic alternative music podcast, the video was just two short videos I had taken in Heathrow airport last week testing out my new webcam. There is some really annoying guy listening to the Manic Street Preachers on his mobile phone loudspeaker just to the left of me.

This video has a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

There’s been lots of talk of the recent problems Skype has been having. It seems they had some serious downtime and had to restrict all user access.

I noticed last night that though I was signed into Skype it was impossible to make myself “online”. The person I was trying to call at the time had the same problem. We thought nothing of it and I went out for the evening.

Right after leaving the house I got two email sent to my Blackberry from PayPal saying that I had just made two payments of €28.75 for Skype credit. These payments sure weren’t initiated by me. I called my credit card company and sure enough they had been charged to my card. No extra credit on my Skype account either!

I’ve contacted Skype but no reply so far. Not quite sure what to do about it now, I hadn’t realised till I read Techmeme a few minutes ago that there was even a big Skype palava going on.

I haven’t heard of this happening to anyone else, but it certainly doesn’t inspire me with confidence. Needless to say I changed all relevant passwords.

Turning dcinput to a Python weblog

I’ve found Worpress more than sufficient for all my blogging needs up until now. It was the obvious choice to make after my Blogger weblog since I wanted to host the site myself. The fantastic plugins and big community just made the choice easier. The plan had always been to start learning PHP and customise the site to my needs. The reality is that there never seems to be enough time to get anywhere useful with that idea.

I’ve been programming in Python for around 4 years now. I had coded in C++ and Java back at university but when I started working at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop all the code that they used for scripting the pipeline was in Python and various shell languages. Of course a lot of the image processing code was in C but I was always much more interested in glueing things together.

That’s what I do now. I write code to glue lots of different technologies together. I look at people’s workflows, at the software they are using and I come up with ways to automate repetitive and error prone things in the media making pipeline. It can be pretty frustrating at times but with persistence I always get there in the end. It’s also a very creative role. I’m constantly thinking of new possiblities, new ways of combining things that weren’t meant to be combined. I’m told this is hacking.

While I do lots of back end scripting I really haven’t had a go at programming for the web. Unfortunately it just hasn’t been needed in my job. That’s a big downside. Anyway I’ve decided I want complete control over my blog, I want to be able to try things out at a moments notice. I also have a few other projects that are web based that I want to get going. Over the comming weeks I will be moving this weblog to a Python solution.

I’m tring to choose between Django and Turbogears.

Django and Turbogears reading

Erik Smartt on moving from Wordpress to a Django blogging solution.

Python blogging software links.

Gustavo Picón on why he chose Django over Turbogears and Ruby on Rails.

Thread from the Turbogears Google group in response to Gustavo.

I’m going to do the tutorial in both Django and Turbogears and see what I like best.

Django notes…

In about an hour I’ve managed to get a page up with Django, though most of the messing around was due to my dodgy mysql installation. Seems to be pretty straight forward so far. I will document my voyage.

MySQL installation instructions on OSX, came in handy.

Resetting your password on a MySQL installation. I had to use the insecure method. I should really write passwords down.

I’m a thoughtful blogger! That just made my day :).

David Lynch on product placement in films. Very funny.

Playing with Amazon Web Services

Spent several hours this evening reading tutorials about and playing around with some of the Amazon web services: S3, EC2 and SQS. I found a great tutorial by Mitch Garnaat explaining how to use all three to build a massively scalable solution to video conversion. At very short notice you can deploy hundreds maybe even thousands of machines to number crunch, pay for what you use, then give them all back. No maintenance headache, no need for massive up front investment.

Mitch has written set of Python libraries called Boto that wrap up some of he Amazon functionality. The tutorials have some good examples and seem pretty straight forward to use. I came across some authentication issues which I hope to resolve in the next few days.

In around a year or two mobile devices that can take great video will be standard. What are all these millions of people going to want to do with their video? That’s the million dollar question.

Eric Nicoli CEO of EMI: “Our goal is to give consumers the best possible digital music experience. By providing DRM-free downloads, we aim to address the lack of interoperability which is frustrating for many music fans”.

This is very exciting. When I was at school and at university I used to spend many hours everyweek finding new music, reading about bands, going to gigs and more generally being part of the music scene at large. I found that when I started work, after a few years a significant part the free time I spent doing these activities was no longer there to spare.

Digital music was supposed to help me here, but until now I’ve been mostly dissapointed and frustrated. I don’t have time to waste anymore so I re-aligned my priorities and music took a back seat. I’m hoping DRM free music will allow me to get excited about music the way I used to be and guess what, I’m not a poor student anymore, I’ve got money to spend now.

Make my life easy.

Dave Winer on the Viacom vs Google business: “It’s a negotiation with users, not a war with Google. Forget Google. The users want something you aren’t providing. So provide it and stop arguing so much.”

That’s pretty much the bottom line.

The uglybooth

Today’s daily self portrait is another photobooth experiment, this time it’s the ugly booth. I did it using the Sony K810i phone, it has some pretty interesting warping features built in to the camera which lead to very amusing photos indeed. There’s something very amusing yet very wrong about seeing your face all distorted.

Ze Frank speaks out on ugly.

By the way if you haven’t been watching Ze Frank this past year, it’s not too late [this is the last week of the show]. Go ahead and watch from the beginning. What he has done this past year is truly remarkable. Not only are his shows great, what’s really outstanding is how he’s manage to engage his audience.

People send in all sorts of bits that he uses in the show, he runs bizarre competitions like dress up your vacuum cleaner or who can create the most ugly MySpace page. There is a massively active forum where members interact and collaborate on projects and there is even an apprenticeship.

The “Messages from the Sportsracers” episode a couple of days ago was extremely long and consisted entirely of clips sent in from people all around the world thanking him for the past year. I watched the whole thing and was really quite touched by it. Ze doesn’t care who you are or what you look like, he’s inspired people from all walks of life and from countries all over the globe to do really important things.

Ze Frank is a real life Ferris Beuler or Van Wilder: the people’s hero.

Remember it’s not about being cool, it’s about being more awesome.

Mark Cuban: “If Viacom wants to put up snippets, scenes, mashups, mockups, quarter, half or full episodes of anything they own, there is nothing to stop them […] Google may not know it, but they have already lost.”

BBC News: “Entertainment giant Viacom Media says it will sue web search engine Google and its video-sharing website YouTube for $1bn”. Hmm, betting against Google is kind of like betting against the Internet: in the end they always win, even if at first it might seem like you did.

What do evangelists do?

At the last London MiniBar event I met quite a diverse group of people, saw some interesting presentations and had a beer or two. One of the people I met was Roo Reynolds who is a Metaverse Evangelist for IBM. It turns out that IBM have a pretty large portfolio with Linden Labs, owning something like 12 Islands in the online virtual world of Second Life. Roo explained that they have started to use Second Life to host meetings where real life IBM employees are geographically spread out worldwide. The dress code is strictly “no jeans, no wings”.

As well as wondering what work would be like if it were more like a video game, I’ve also been wondering what it is that this new breed of evangelists, you know the ones that work for companies, actually do. Whatever it is, with companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and IBM all boasting many evangelists on their books, you can bet they are doing something useful. Somehow the term has migrated into everyday business speak, it’s just I must have missed it happen.

One of the definitions of an ‘evangelist’ at dictionary.com is “A missionary preacher sent forth to prepare the way for a resident pastor; an itinerant missionary preacher”. Putting the religious bit to one side, I quite like the ‘preparing the way’ part, kind of like you’d be out there in unchartered territory, meeting new people with new ideas and viewpoints, figuring out how you could help them.

What do you think modern evangelists do? Let me know in the comments.

Technology Evangelist: “People who have one simple goal: Better Living Through Technology”.

Robert Scobble on evangelists: “Another reason for an evangelist never to tell a lie. Credibility. Who will listen to an evangelist who tells you something that you already know isn’t true.”

Guy Kawasaki on the Art of Evangelism.

The art of telling stories

More and more I’m realising how important it is to be able to tell stories. There’s something very fundamental about storytelling, it’s the tool us humans use both to learn and understand new concepts. Interestingly in the real world, in everyday life, storytelling is not one directional. A good storyteller is very aware of the audience, how they are reacting, constantly looking for new ways to engage them, to guide their thoughts.

Much like a stand up comedian, a storyteller must be able to ad-lib, to create things of the cuff, to see new parallels and to pluck relevant things from their story archive. A bad storyteller has it all planned out in advance. The problem is that it’s impossible to see in advance how to engage the audience, how they will react. If there is one skill you should practice it is the art of storytelling, it is a sign of experience.

Incidentally, I imagine that good evangelists are good storytellers.