November 2004 Blog Posts
I would really like to get together with a bunch of people and form a digital media co-operative. By that, I mean a group that collaborates on new media projects and tutors each other. I figure it would be the best way to learn all these cool applications. It's much too expensive to take tutored courses and it's too laborious to figure it out from books. Training DVD's are a good halfway point but it would be so much more inspiring to work with others to figure out how to use programs like Photoshop, Flash, Premiere, After Effects, Maya, Lightwave, Bryce,...
I've really got into using Bit Torrent over the last week. I knew of the software but didn't have any need for it until I wanted to see a rerun of The Power of Nightmares. Couldn't find a scheduled rerun, script or DVD but I found you could download it using Bit Torrent! It took a few evenings but the quality is good. I love the Internet.
Then I started searching around and discovered all the other stuff you could download using Bit Torrent. Wow.
SourceForge.net turned five this week. From their newsletter:
Today we have close to 1,000,000 users and 100,000 projects. The 10Mbps we used for bandwidth has now grown to 1.6Gbps (including mirrors). Our five servers have ballooned to more than 80. Our storage requirements have gone from 10 gigabytes of data to more than 1 terabyte.
Finally got around to finishing Crimson Skies High Road To Revenge. I had got stuck and left it for a while but I tried it again and got through it. Overall, it's a surprisingly good game as long as you like air combat. The flying is highly unrealistic but very playable and fun. Good story line and variety of tasks.
I also finished all of Project Gotham Racing 2 a couple of months ago. It's much much better than the original version which I got stuck on and never finished. The graphics are much the same but the game play and...
Anyone know of a some cheap magic boxes that would allow me to stream audio from my PC to my home stereo without running any wires? I imagine one box would plug into my current soundcard and the other box would just plug into my stereo. This is my preferred solution so that I can use all the features of the soundcard. Alternatively, it could just emulate a soundcard on my PC and use WiFi to do the transmission to the box connected to the stereo. I guess another possibility would be for the box on the PC to be a USB...
Not very good news - at least for the Microsoft stock price for FY2006. Good news for consumers though.
Microsoft has released a new Community Technical Preview of Avalon. You can check out the SDK documentation here. While I look forward to the day when Windows apps are written to Avalon, I still think Macromedia Flash has the brightest future.
It's simple enough. Flash is cross-platform, it's everywhere and you can make some fantastic UI's. Check out the video's of the Macromedia MAX 2004 Conference. They claim that it only takes 12 months for a new version of Flash to be installed by 80% of their massive installed base. Their tools are getting better and broadband is making Flash more...
Went to a good lecture on using ICT In Education by Niel McLean from Becta. Some of the memorable points Niel made included:
a good ICT programme has been measured to increase student performance by 5% (I thought that was rather small)
the adoption models were all pretty obvious and no surprises
ICT should not be used to just deliver information passively; it's a personal interactive and exploratory learning tool
ICT should never replace real experiences; it should supplement them
the real power of ICT is when you start changing the processes and organisation of learning
unfortunately, once students are at a computer, many teachers stop...
Arrgghh! Hotmail has dropped support for Outook unless you pay £15 a year. I like to use my hotmail account for my junk address. It's the one I give to businesses and websites where there's a risk it will get on a mailing list and sold on. I don't need any other feature from Hotmail so I don't see it worth paying for Hotmail Plus. Time to move to Yahoo! or fastmail.fm; Hotmail has been depracated!
Ran into the Photo Electronic Imaging website (PEI) and their list of Cool2 Award winners. If you're into digital photography and want to see what the professionals use, it's an interesting list. Nice toys!
I've been away on holiday and things have been quiet on the computing front. However, last week, I've been rejigging my home infrastructure.
I've trashed my old server and installed Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition. I've also doubled my mirrored storage to two 80Gb disks. Instead of using the Promise RAID controller on my motherboard, I'm using the RAID abilities of Windows Server. The server is primarily for file sharing. I'll also use it as a web server and running SQL Server. I'm mulling over installing Uniform Server so I can experiment with Apache/PHP/MySQL Open Source projects but, really, I should...