I have been in america...

and it was nice, but in 140 hours I was airborn for 40. San Diego is really nice, especially if someone else is putting you up at the Carlsbad Four Seasons. It is very very very liovely- Valhalla with infinity pools. I like hot tubs at dawn with humming birds.

Chicago was realy nice too- at last I caught up with cousin Eleanor and got the grand tour of Chicago's finest architecture. Then I got the wizz bang Evanston low down- including a trip to a top five dawg joint, a pancake that could have killed a small dog if dropped from a sufficient height, and several whirlwind meetings. Might have given a presentation on the bridge of the starshiop enterprise at some point too. Weird trip. But nice.

My sincere thanks to Lisa, Jerry and Andrew and all the other lovely colonial types I met.

For shame...

Ok so twitter is cool and great and has kept me in touch with the world for two weeks, but this MEEZ business- what am I thinking! Still it's about right according to Row, and she should know.

Alcazabar & Mulacen

Alcazabar & Mulacen, originally uploaded by meeware1.

Sorry for all the inactivety here. However, here´s why- I was walking up these hills. Took me best part of a week from Ugihar to this point, and inthe end I didn´t do the big one, but it was great, and I stayed safe- later that day (sunday) the clouds came in, the vis dropped to nothing, and the temp went down fast. Meanwhile I was in the refuge drinking with jolly Norweigans and Germans.

I think this photo is taken from about 3181 metres, but I don´t know for sure- happy to be corrected.

Anyone want to buy some crampons?- only used once (by me).

Kickin' the habit

The 77O has flown home, the 9500 is back at the warren, and I am now running with a dinky little Motorola number. Not over enamoured of the new thing, but hey, at least it's just a phone, and it'll punt out a tweet when i need it to.

And now I'm flying off to spain, to what I'm not sure, but it'll be tech light. I have decided to take the Ogg though. Wasn't going to, but decided there's a need to toons when walking a lot, and theres a little room to stick some Led Zep and Neil Young and Lonnie Liston Smith in there, so, yeah, why not.

Hurgh! The habit really kicks in

Ok, so this 9500 is a really nice piece of kit. Symbian is a bit ropey, the applications seem to need a pointer that the device doesn't have- the joystick is useless in trying to do a presentation- but a stylus or mousey type thing would be great.

However, there is something rather like a killer app taking place when you start to do 'twitter' on a phone with a nice big keyboard. Ooooh, lovely.

Have to use the keyboard though, becuase for some insane reason, there's no predictive text in this falsh gordon housebrick (mustn't have been room for it after they squeezed in a massive useless powerpoint application- sheesh!

Richt, now I really want to get geo twitter workibng- can't yet see how people are letting it know where they are. Confused, intrigued, facinated even. Hooked.

Mobile Gadgetry- Geek Crack

I swear this stuff is addictive. So I have borrowed a nokia 770 for a while- I like it- bugs and all. It's not mine, so perhas I haven't gone as far as I should have in personalising it; plus the whole loading of libraries for Linux apps is mildly intimidating- a may have done coding in a unix environment, but that doesn't mean I was ever really comfortable with it.

Anyway, over the wekend I broke the second of my two spare old unlocked phones by dropping it really hard. Poor old nokia blob dies a sudden death, with no flicker of recovery. Yesterday therefore, after a very interesting Mobile SIG meeting, where we discussed future research invstment strategy cycles of development, the role of the BBC in the mobile landscape, and the role of the mobile in the bBC landscape, I went to scrounge a test phone of Steve Jolly.

Well bless him, he didn't have a phone handy, but there was a Nokia 9500 kicking around I could borrow for a few weeks.

Oh, blimey, what a beast. It took me an hour to find how to turn off the keystroke beep. Incredible machine. Not sure I go a bundle on Symbian just yet, and the keyboard has shades of the ZX81 about it, but this could be fun.

At the moment i've got it running on my tesco pay-as-you-go sim (very very cheap) but I might slip my work SIM into it later to see what the web access is like. Hmm. Its like I just graduated to freebasing.....!

BBC does gritty DRM podcast

Those brilliant chaps at backstage have been exceptionally brave/clever and put out a podcast exploring the myriad issues around the use of DRM on BBC content delivered over the web. The luminaries engaged in this admittedly long 'cast include Tom Loosemore, Miles Metcalf and many others.

http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/news/archives/2007/02/bbc_backstage_p_1.html

The reactions have been gerally positive- though boingboing seems to have reacted more to the crcumstances than perhaps the actual content of the 'cast.

The one point I'd make.., the two points I'd make are:
The law is behind the times and will have to change, and it should be opne and clear about the new rights and responsibilites of creators and users of media- a clear fair law is a better barrier to priacy than any encyption.
Secondly, a good drm system need nt be proprietory- there is o theoretical impediment to fully robust open source DRM- only the keys must be secure, all else can, and really, for a public service, should be open.

Erm, can I have a third point- DRM has two parts, hard (technical managment of access and security) and soft (definition of rights and managed allocation thereof) and by and large we, the world at large, are a bit weak at both.

Pain at both ends

Had a great weekend of adventurous geekery- huge game of toy soldiers, big long bike ride on brand ew shiney red bike and tried to get some new stuff to happen on this Nokia thingy. Best not to dwell on the toy soldiery (it's the nadir of my geelery) but the bike ride was brilliant- it was really cold with the misty clouds bowing off the downs, but the ride was great. I think I might need t make some adjustments to the bike before taking it out along that type of route again- road style slicks were tough to get much grip with, and the rear wheel jammed up totally with the snug (and very practical) mud guards. The 'penny farthing' or 'gentleman's velocipede will need some serious adaptation in order to get it full of roadable.

Thinking of maybe getting a second set of wheels. Maybe. Dunno.

Ah, so why the other end hurty? Well I'm trying to get this 770 to do some interesting stuff and now my brain hurts trying to understand how I got a lib conflict on automatic repository synching. or something. Maybe. Dunno.

Flickr Merge- I'm really not keen

I have a flickr account, I enjoy flickr. It's a pleasure to use flickr and I really like the interface and the community feel and the, well, the general flickr thing. I like it so much that I pay them for it. Not a lot, but it's the only thing I pay for on the web (ain't the internet cool!).

You've seen the news- Yahoo accounts only from the 15th March. I'm not happy. I don't really like the yahoo experience- it's just nowhere near as nice. So, I don't really want a relationship with yahoo jammed into the flickr thing. Flickr is pure and clean and focussed and just right, yahoo is cludgy messy complicated overwheening and not something I want to pay for.

Ok so I have been paying them for ages- ever since I signed up for a pro account, but that was still a relationship with flickr, not yahoo. Oh it make s me mad.

On the upside, I know the person who wrote the BBC news online story today!

innov2

still here and it's going well. done a pitch for four ideas, and bar the one the engineering blok stamped on, all were well recieved. sounds like the iplayer one happening anyway, the planning tool is recognised as essential, and the carbon footprint tool is a no brainer. whoo hoo!

innovating as i type!

sitting here in the bbc innovation forum, so it felt appropriate to blog a bit. highlights so far include;
os trust framework for media exchange
multi sensory signal processing
a quick chat with siemens innovation chap

so far so good (but the monkey story was wierd!)

Too into the music (metadata)

So I am a very lucky boy, and kind generous wife (who has just made the most amazing muffins by the way) bought me an MP3 player for Christmas. And knowing what an utter anti nasty software paranoid freak I am she buys me one of these . It's brilliant. And it plays Ogg vorbis files. These are like MP3 in that they are compressed music files, but often they are better quality. Ah quality- so often a secondary, tertiary, or, lets face it, a completely ignored consideration in modern broadcast. Crunchy talk shows, squished classical, fizzy jazz, and that's just Radio! So in a curious mix of neo ludite harking for a quality past, allied with a pseudo-geeky need to try and get this device to have very cool open source support, I eventually set myself up with this software to get music off CDs, and this software to turn it into very nice Ogg files. Took a little time to get it all set up, then the next question is- what do I call the files.....?

Cue massive wracking of brain- what do I want to see on screen? Will it be whole albums? Tracks? will I navigate via a menu or just shuffle? Where is the metadata coming from? What will I use ot for? How long will it last? Will I change the use? Panic! Worry! Confusion! Insomnia! (Ok it was christmas and I over ate. A bit. Bt I swaer soe of the insomnia really was down to an inability to commit to a metadata schema for my new MP3 player!

I am so sad.

Anyway I have tried a couple of schemes, and neither is really perfect.
For whole albums I do a directory structure of artist/album/tracks and I name the tracks as:
Track Number- Track name dot ogg.
For ripped tracks I just put them all under the artist, and then put:
Track Name- Album Name (track number) dot ogg.

Excpet I'm not even being consistent in these applications (I ripped the whole Yo La Tengo album in the individual track schema as an experiement and it is more useful, except the album name is so long that it takes over a minute to scroll across the screen)(good album mind).

Any advice on good track naming schema for small screen mp3 player usage gratefully recieved.

Like the dust will ever settle!

"It'll get sorted out when the dust settles"

If I hear that ever again I might well resort to fisticuffs. Last time I posted was about RDA and how it looked like i was now going to be largely on internal projects. Well I sort of still am. RDA has been a really hard slog, but is significntly further along now (Radio 3 and Radio 4 do now have a fighting chance of getting a digital archive by May), and my brain did get totally scarred thinking about audio metadata.

However- I now have an intern (he's great- kind of like having a remote mini-me I can send on missions to parts of the BBC I've never seen). He's also about eight times brighter than I have ever been (I know I'm getting thicker), and far more personable and very very driven. He's also very generous with his geek toys, and for the last few weeks has let me teeter on the edge of completely destroying his Nokia 770 . This is an amazing device- not perfect, but very very interesting.

A side bar- this guy makes me realise that no matter how anti social and borderline asbergers I get, I am not a techno geek, due largely to the fact I am useless at tech and very very far behind the times.

Anyhoo, so this new (to me) thing is around, and Framework Seven is kicking off, and so yesterday I get to go to Denmark to discuss some projects about mobile services and the future of broadcasting (waaaaaaaaaaaay out of my depth) and who is there but a really nice chap from Nokia who has just donated 100 of these things to the University I'm visiting! MAD! Serendipitous! bizarre!

There's no way I can begin to pull all these threads of weird serendipitous work related hi tech future broadcast stuff together in a blog post- I'm trying, but my brain just can't. I may post more later.

Eating my words

AHHHHAAAHHAhahaha ha ha ha , hem, herr, hurr, hmm. Oka, so was it just a few weeks ago I said RDA was simple project, just a little filler of a task, something to keep me busy I suppose? Yeah, well, erm, that was then. Ten days into running the project we have taken on a two month delay, thrown out ll the design documentation, realised the requirements are no where near, and embarked on a complete restructure of the project.
What's even more entertaining is that we have decided between all of the project partners that the only way to hit even this new, later, launch date, is to work like madmen until the middle of january, then drop absolutely pristine, faultless, impecable, detailed to the minutai specification on the developers, and then wait for them to deliver.
The DTI stuff is coming a rather distant second right now- and christmas parties are like landmines in my road.

Bah

Humbug

What am I doing these days?

Perhaps a dull post, but a worthwhile one- what on earth am I being paid for nowadays?

Radio Digital Archive is something I'm taking on next month- it's a fairly straightforward project to capture a small proportion of Radio 3 and 4 output and get it into properly searchable archives completely digitally. In spite of it's limited ambitions there are some real challenges though, largely due to the mix of legacy kit involved. Um, legacy sounds like it's ancient, which it isn't. It's more that the kit for the radio networks has all been installed slightly differently for each network, and the metadata in particular (the stuff that let's you know what you're looking at/listening to) varys in slight but significant ways. Anyway, it's great to be getting back into the heart of the BBC's real ops again.

Meanwhile the extramural projects continue- Prestospace (you remember, the big EU funded project) has been busy ish- we held a couple of training/briefing days for archives this month, at the Globe theatre and at Kings Colledge. Between the two events we spoke directly to over sixty archives from across the UK and europe, and explored all sorts of issues from project planning and funding to figuring out whether to use disk or data tape to store your assets.

Next week the two DTI projects we applied for kick off- Yes we got funding (horray!). Bugger, there's only me to work on them (and I've now got RDA too!). Our kick off meetings are in Havant Monday and Tuesday, then Wednesday it's this conference at the IET , which is likely to be extremely interesting, but I am very much concerned that I won't have a clue what to say. I've got the second presentation slot I think, talking about what archives want out of multimedia formats. Quite.

Friday next week will be great though- Matthew Addis and I are off to Dublin to run a workshop for the 'British and Irish Sound Archives' looking at managing preservation projects. It's the last jaunt I've got before the RDA thing means I'm not mean't to do conferences, so I intend to make the most of it.

TELL ME MORE

Is the name of the wiki for this great event I went to yesterday; the AHRC/BBC summit looking at the open archive.

Congratulations to Rowena, Brendan and Johny for their sterling work. Really facinting discussions, and I think some great progress in exploring how the open archive trial will work for audiences in academia and beyond. Hopefully some help for the public value test for creative archive too.

Incredibly funky venue too- Home Sweet Home. Perfect for the 'open space' conference structure that was brilliantly run by Johnnie Moore.

Bit cobwebby round here

It's been a while, but perhaps it's time to blog again.

Probably best to lots of little ones....

A big question

Struck me the other day walking in the sunshine;

Why should the decendants of the best gamblers get to consume the majority of the worlds resources?

It sounds extraordinary when put like that doesn't it? But in essence this is the situation that capitlism leads us to. Gamble on life, and win, and you get the lions share of the goodies. Inheritance of material wealth has taken a fairly simple principle with real benefits and turned it into an incredibly skewed social model, and much of the principle of modern government and statehood in the west at least is predicated on preserving just those inherited wealth mechanisms.

Clear as Mud

Last week I was invited along to a meeting to explore how we could work better with our outsourced IT people. It's a couple of years since the controvercial sell off of what was a large and rather specialised department, and it would be fair to say it's been a mixed couple of years. Not least because a whole new dept was created to manage the relationship, and it did feel that a certain degree of difficulties were associate with that.

Anyway, all the mal-communication and horridness is, I hope, behind us, and in the hallowed halls of the English Speaking Union, just off Berkley Square (a perculiarly old school institution, and a most odd choice of venue we sat and met with the Siemens and BBC technology group people who are 'here to help'.

Umm, not really sure what they told us on reflection. There is a lot to be told (and I couldn't put it all in a blog post), but the picture I got was of a cake half baked. Whatever they have done to the BBCT that was, they're not finished doing it, as the org chart I saw was full of abitrary and rather opaque structural distinctions. I have notes that read like an attack of Accronymitis- ORS SRS TIAG etc.

They tried bless them, but there is no big picture shown, and no one who seems to have the confidence to describe it. Still chinks in the armour did appear, so better keep pluging away.

Digital Rights Management

One of these days I should sort out a seperate work/life blog arrangement- until that day....

Last week I was invited to a conference on DRM at the IET (previously the IEE) in London. I wasn't speaking, but in the end the turnout was so small, and the Q&A sessions so long, that I got to yabber away for ages. Anyway, this is a mildly edited review of who was there and who did what:

Andy Liegh of the BBC explored the theoretical and historical background to cryptography- and the lessons from history he wanted to make clear are that:

* Pretty much any code can be broken. Bar one time pads. But they aren't appropriate fr broadcast.
* Only KEYs matter, time and money spent on keeping any other part of the system secret is wasted- this may have intimated that open source is a perfectly valid platform for DRM.
* Key management is a nightmare, and it's at its worst in the situation that digital tv broadcasts find themselves in.

Jim Wilkinson of Sony BPRL explored the various current technical 'tools' available to do DRM. This was an excellent introduction to the current available options.

* Fingerprinting (visible and invisible)
* Watermarking (robust and fragile)
* Message encryption
* Key exchange
* Message validation

Adrian Brazier (assistnt director, comms ad content industries, DTI) spoke about the governments planned role in the field of DRM, and in general indicated that there was a strong aversion to applying blanket regulation in this area. He highighted the key govt reviews in progress and which of these might impact DRM or copyright.

Len Withall of NDS (the people who do the cards for Sky boxes) spoke about his firms role in DRM and anti piracy. Len is a colourful character and his firm has been succesful in keeping the SKY encryption secure, but that's only a part of the who content custodianship landscape. NDS do more besides though, but weren't being s public about that.

Dr Myles Jelf of Bristows (lawfirm with IT and engineering specialism) gave a facinatng outline of the legal framework across the UK, europe and to a limited extent the world that DRM operates in. Much case law and precedent at present, and strong, flexible, globally applicable solutions that respect copyright and access exceptions seem unlikely for the foreseable future, even across europe. Myles is clearly brilliant, and very urbane and friendly. Lawyers can do that.

Simon Wakefield of Deloitte did a fairly standard consultancy futurologist schpeil, but in his Q&A session the discussion really got going about the applicability and extensability of content ownership models across developing media landscapes.

After lunch we had Ted Shapiro from the MPA- he's the top lawyear for hollywood in europe. Doesn't mince his words, enjoys getting easy wins in an argument, very fast talker, and has profound insight on (and some contempt for) for the way national governments in the EU hav tried to legislate for DRM. He'd easily come across as a bogeyman to many, and I think he's had run ins with Cory Doctorow.

Jill Johnstone from the national consumer council presented a case that current DRM implementations were being far too restrictive on consumer access to content. Hers was a somewhat lonely voice, but she had good points to make regarding exceptional access conditions and how these may be being eroded by stringent DRM implementations. She like everyone took pot shots at the Sony DRM debacle. In fact throughout the dy ythe technical, legal, and commercial error of the sony approach was routinely disected.

David Lancefield of PWC did an economic review of the role of DRM- looking at promotion or regulation. A high level pseudo legal philosophical review.

Finally Mark Jeffrey, a microsoft programme manager and raporteur for the ebu oulined a drm framework for use f media wihin the home that could offer a great deal of benefits for the future distribution of content. Called DVB CPCM this manages an authorised consumer domain and manages an end to end root of trust allowing more constent to be legally released to paying consumers. Mark was a facinating speaker and would be a brilliant contributor to future workshops.