Media Fantasies
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 23rd November, 2005 @ 02:41
Back in my days at Benjamin Britten High School in sunny Lowestoft, I got involved more than once in an annual event known as House Half Day. I remember being totally fascinated by the project the first time I saw it, and I couldn't wait for my chance to contribute to it.
House Half Day was the afternoon of the last day of term before Christmas. Every tutor group would gather together in their tutor room, with the occasional exception of pupils sacrificed for the event itself, and huddle around a TV. There weren't enough TVs in the school for every tutor group, so often the teachers would bring in their own sets from home.
Each TV plugged into the aerial point, one of which was available in every classroom of the school. If this was by design or added at great cost later, I'll never know. I'll also never know if said aerial point was actually attached to a useful aerial that could receive your normal terrestrial channels. Because we were not interested in receiving BBC One, we all tuned in to a special broadcast coming from one of the smallest classrooms in the Saturn House block.
Live, from this classroom cum TV studio came a show hosted by two or three presenters, in front of an elaborate set, themed differently each year. From two broadcast video cameras, and a rather chunky VHS deck, cut together through a rather ancient mixing desk came a showcase of that year's GCSE Media students' coursework.
Between each item, a live show built around an inter-house competition. In each tutor group a pre-nominated runner would return the group's answers to regular quiz questions posed throughout the afternoon.
It was a fun afternoon of TV, that certainly made a change from the usual lessons, and completely captivated me. Eventually I managed to get myself involved, partly by being a GCSE Media student and producing a video and partly thanks to my computers skills, along with dragging in my own Amiga and later PC. With much poking of ScalaMM, Lightwave 3D and later on PowerPoint, I was creating various graphics and titles for the afternoon's event.
I also got to spend hours in the tiny edit suite (read cupboard), compiling together videos, including the title sequence to the Titanic themed event for the year after I took my GCSE in Media. These were the days of linear video editing, a source VHS deck, a destination deck and an editing board with jog and shuffle dials to spool through each video frame by frame and mark my edit points. I listened intently to "My Heart Will Go On" by a certain French-Canadian more times than I care to remember, or indeed am able to recall after taking the medication prescribed.
I've always been fascinated by the production of television and my experiences on House Half Day have built on that. And so now I find myself working on a community IPTV project, where we have produced lots of local content and made it available on demand. But I want to go further than that...
Before I was even employed full time by the company I now work for, I was set the task of developing a mobile broadcasting unit. A video camera attached in one end and wirelessly out the other would stream an MPEG2 multicast. Well, the wireless part didn't work so well, but we did end up with a good, live, multicasting MPEG2 encoder.
So now I spend my evenings hunting on ebay for a cheap video mixing desk, bugging my superiors to hold a launch event for our upgraded system (we always film such things) and dying to attach a DV deck with some prepared graphics and footage, along with a video camera or two, pump it through my encoder and once again broadcast live TV!
Interfacing Telly
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 23rd November, 2005 @ 02:05
I've been pretty quiet for another week, though in that time I've managed to cook up several blog entry titles and outlines. Hopefully I'll flesh some of them out soon. Here's one to be getting on with.
I spent most of last week working on the interface to the revised Carpenters Connect service. It's all HTML based which makes development fairly straightforward. Here's a little preview of where things are at the moment, currently lacking some topical images and text...
It's coming along quite nicely, and works great on various size TVs and with both brands of set top box we currently employ on the estate (which was one of the aims, a single codebase for multiple STB types).
What I'm most happy with is the system underlying it all. It's been a while since I coded in PHP, and it's nice to know I can still remember how to do it! Building pages like this is now a simple matter of creating an array that specifies the links on the left, what image and text should be displayed and if the images and text should roll over if any given link is highlighted.
#
# Carpenter Connect Sample Page
#
include("libs.php");
$links = array(
array(
'url' => 'page1.php',
'text' => 'Sample Link',
'image' => 'sample2.jpg',
'infourl' => 'page1_desc.html'
),
array(
'url' => 'playvideo.php',
'text' => 'Sample Video Preview',
'multicast' => '239.192.254.1',
'infourl' => 'whatson.php'
)
);
makeMenuPage($links, '', '', '', 'welcome');
And with a little user agent string peeking, it also allows a half-size video preview of a given satellite, terrestrial or local TV programme to be displayed live in place of the image, with guide data in the text area below.
Early impressions seem to be favourable, we'll have to see how it goes on full deployment. I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, but we didn't really have the budget for one. I'm hoping the result doesn't reflect that too much though.
Progressive Day
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 16th November, 2005 @ 18:09
It's been a pretty good day all in all, my first day back in London since my holiday, the usual M25 slowness, but otherwise a good journey in and back out.
The work day started with a trip to Newham Council's special portacabin full of surplus to requirements, retired equipment that the company I work for tends to inherit for our various evil schemes. And in amongst many, many Alcatel switches were too little blue cubic surprises. Cobalt Qubes to be precise. A quick Google and it appears to be easy to install these cute little boxes with a more modern Linux distro and make them useful again. Watch this space! Which reminds me, I must dig out my empeg and have a little fun with that one of these days.
Then back to the office with our booty, and I got on with setting up the new set top box server to boot the Pace DSL4000 we have at Carpenters. After lots of fiddling, it's working nicely, apparently multicasting a TFTP boot image. Not sure I believe that it's not being unicasted at the moment, we'll have to see what happens when I move more STBs to it.
Talking of set top boxes, we'll also be deploying 12 Amino Aminet 110 boxes at Carpenters, the same we used on the beta site. So another job is sorting out our boot server to provide software images for these boxes.
I've noticed a lot of my search engine referred traffic is people looking up information about the Aminet 110 STB, mostly people looking for the default password, along with some other less dubious stuff. I'd love to be able to write a few howtos about the things you can do with this rather cool little box, however I suspect our NDA prohibits this, so sorry guys, you'll have to find out for yourself.
Today I also discovered LDAP configuration support is now actually built into the ISC DHCP server, so I'll be configuring that tomorrow and another document will no doubt appear in the docs/carpenters section to go along with my tweakings.
Richard's decided he's getting fat and doesn't wanna eat lunch any more. And as I've already got fat, rather poor and am lazy enough not to want to wander into Stratford everyday on my own, I've decided to make myself a little lunch to take in each day. Tomorrow's tuna sandwiches are prepared and in the fridge. We'll see how long I last and/or how long it takes Richard to break.
Satellite Fun
Posted by stephen on Monday, 14th November, 2005 @ 10:39
With much excitement I stole myself away to Wickes and Homebase yesterday to procure a range of manly items, including my very own drill for making holes in my walls. I felt very butch for doing so, though as always, completely out of my depth in a DIY store.
Much was my disappointment upon my return home when I realised I'd forgotten to pack away the bolts, etc for mounting the satellite to the wall when I loaded everything into the car at work on Friday evening, so I couldn't mount the dish as I'd intended. All my manly purchases had gone to waste!
I came downstairs this morning, planning to measure up things with my new tape measure and buy any necessary bolts. Then I had an idea. The stand for my parasol, perhaps the arm would fit in there? No, it's about the same size. So perhaps the dish could be mounted on the stand. Yes!
And so I'm able to pickup Astra 28.2E (Sky Digital) by aiming the dish carefully and pointing down ever so slightly (some trial and error there), along with EutelSat Hotbird 13.0E (lots of foreign channels). And it even works when attached to my little PVR/STB/PC thingy I've talked so much about before.
Today I've been mostly enjoying RTL, Rai Uno and VIVA polsk.
It's Been a While
Posted by stephen on Sunday, 13th November, 2005 @ 12:02
I've been quiet for a while, I know. Last weekend was my mum's birthday, so I went back home. Also met my brother's girlfriend of 5 months, who was lovely, we had great fun winding him up! Was great to see mum again, must get home more often.
And how lovely of her to tell me that I shouldn't feel like I had to come home at Christmas if I'd prefer to spend Christmas with my partner. I was really touched. But I'll be most certainly going home again for Christmas, I love spending that time in particular with my family.
Not much I wanna say about tech stuff right this minute, but here's a hint from the latest project...
I Love the Internet
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 01st November, 2005 @ 23:31
So I decided to follow up on one of my little inspirations, all the wifi stuff, and I decided that I need a better understanding of electromagnetism so that I might be able to construct useful antennas.
I began my hunt on Google, as always, and found some interesting reading materials, all the information I could possibly read. And as I began to read I realised I'm rubbish at absorbing information that way. I'm so much better watching someone explain things or playing around with stuff myself to get my head around it.
Just when I thought I'd probably have to give in on this approach, I refined my query and Google spat out a link to the MIT website. I remember reading a few years ago now that MIT planned to produce videos of some of their courses and make them freely available online, calling the project OpenCourseWare. Well, the project has borne fruit, and Google took me straight to this page which was exactly what I needed.
I'm part way through the first lecture at the moment and it's bringing back lots of memories of science lessons at school, stuff I'd forgotten I knew. And I find the style of presentation very effective. I think the crazy Dutch Professor helps with that!
Go check it out if there's anything you're interested in learning, they've got plenty of materials for all kinds of subjects online. I love the free software philosophy that spawns this type of project, the idea that knowledge wants to be free. And I love that we have a medium available to get it to so many people.
Inspiring Week
Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 01st November, 2005 @ 00:25
I've been back from holiday for a week, and I have to say I think it's been a rather good week all in all. So many things have given me inspiration this week, it's hard to recall them all!
How many of them will actually translate into anything more than ideas is a completely different question. I'm an easily excited person when it comes to ideas, ever since I can remember. Unfortunately for as long as I can remember I've also had the habit of starting lots of little projects, personal and technical, and not really seeing them through.
But anyway, that's rather depressing and I'm actually in a good mood at the moment. To bring it back upbeat, I also feel pretty confident that one day I'm going to find a project that will hold my attention, hopefully make the world a better place in some small way, and if I'm lucky make me loads of money :)
For now, let me tell you (in no particular order) about some of this week's inspirational things, what they inspire me to do and how likely or not it is I'll do anything about them. Sorry if this post gets a bit long, but hey, it's not like there's many people reading this, so not too many man hours lost!
Tom Coates' final post whilst working at the BBC is all about the project his department has been recently working on, a web-based system for audio annotation. It looks like they've done an incredible job, I'm really excited about the applications this has for personalised content delivery. A seamless, automated and highly personalised audio/video news report seems within reach. All powered by folksonomies and the network effect. Oooh look at me using the jargon!
Inspired to build a cool AJAX application. Chances pretty minimal. Not enough time or useful ideas to hand, or patience to program anything for hours at a time.
More4 has proven a good source of inspiration this week too. Grand Designs Revisited told the truly aspirational tale of Ben Law, a woodsman who has built his beautiful house, entirely by hand, with an occasional and voluntary workforce, utilising only materials from the local area, mostly his forest. Now he, his wife and baby son live an almost entirely self-sufficient life, with their own power, heat, water and food. And a good, fulfilling life it appears to be.
Inspired to get around to sorting out my house, plastering, painting, bathroom. Get garden shed, which is also partially inspired by this guy and by the currently rusting BBQ in my garden. Chances are fair on some of this I'd say, need spare room clear to practice on though. And better weather for garden stuff. Already making excuses!
Also from More4, Super Size Me proved to be a much more interesting film than I'd expected.
It was certainly a provocative documentary and gave me plenty to think about. It's time to cut out the fizzy drinks and eat out less! It also led me to season pass 30 Days, a weekly documentary by Morgan Spurlock, the man behind Super Size Me. In the first show, he and his girlfriend attempt to live on US minimum wage for a month, and it's certainly an enlightening experience. It made me realise how easy it is to take for granted lucky we are to have the social security system we do. It may not be perfect, but we'd be worse off without it.
Inspired to eat better and be more thrifty. Chances not too bad actually. Haven't bought any fizzy drink or chocolate bars yet, despite massive craving. Am still managing to take sandwiches to work. Am cooking more interesting stuff at home. Partly helps having lovely boyfriend to cook for.
All the wireless stuff I've previously mentioned has been rather inspiring too. Not just because I want to play with the technology, but because I've been reading up about how the antennas work and it's revived the nerdy little science geek in me. Should have paid more attention in A-Level Physics!
Inspired to learn/recall the maths and physics behind electromagnetism (primarily radio waves, etc), want to build cantenna and go test. Chances are I think in the 25% area, some more investigation may occur.
