16 Wednesday Jul 2008
Posted in Music, Technology
Radiohead’s latest video is certainly gaining a lot of attention, purely because of the fact that it was shot without any cameras. The end result is amazing. As you can see …
But having an engineering background I found the short video clip about how the video was made, just as intriguing…
11 Friday Jul 2008
Posted in Photography
I came across a fabulous project from reading Robert Scoble’s blog – The Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Project. The goal is create a large scale gigapixel image of the valley walls to help research such as rock fall in the park. The work has been done with xRez. The XRez site for the Yosemite project is here. I have to admit that I’ve always liked Yosemite since I first saw photos taken by Ansell Adams, and having been there and tried to capture the glory of the place myself find photography in the area fascinating. To see how beautiful the valley is and the stunning detail of the gigapixel images checkout the Glacier Point photo xRex have posted here.
I recommend installing the plugin and looking at some of the high definition pictures the image detail is simply stunning. Here is a clip from a zoomed in view to illustrate …
And my efforts …
10 Thursday Jul 2008
Posted in Photography
Photojojo have come up with an interesting and fun challenge. Rather than sending a letter and getting the people to send on the letter to everyone they know (a chain letter), this works by taking a picture with a picture in it, or retrospectively adding the picture digitally. Pass this on to friends who repeat the process. So eventually you have a photographic Russian Doll effect. It would be interesting to see how many pictures can be nested.
The full article and example can be found at http://photojojo.com/content/photo-projects/the-photo-chain/.
10 Thursday Jul 2008
According to the Boss’ website (here) he will be releasing a live EP containing tracks taken from the current ‘Magic Tour’ with guest appearances from Alejandro Escovedo, Tom Morello and Roger McGuinn. The EP will be available in digital download form from the likes of iTunes.
The EP is to help raise money for the Danny Federici Melanoma Fund, a charity setup after the death of Bruce’s long time keyboardist. As the release is for a charitable cause all profits and royalties are going to the charity.
07 Monday Jul 2008
Posted in Music
A number of music sites have been reporting on Thom Yorke’s classical dabbling including Filter-Mag.com. Unlike Greenwood’s full orchestral score of There will Be Blood, Thom’s effort is only a contribution of a group of classical remixes. With Thom and Jonny having gone all classical, and the experimentalism of Radiohead what are the chances of a full ‘classical’ Radiohead album?
04 Friday Jul 2008
I came across this rather cool little service – FixMyStreet. It allows you to mark onto maps problems from potholes to fly tipping. The website will then submit the problem to the appropriate authorities. To can also see what other problems have been reported. a lot easier than tying to work out which council and which department to report a problem to.
03 Thursday Jul 2008
Posted in Music, Technology
The BPI (formerly British Phonographic Industry) along with Virgin Media have started getting tough with people they believe are downloading illegally. Virgin Media according to BBC News have sent out 800 letters to people they believe are illegally downloading warning them that they may face being disconnected and possibly legal action. This is probably a step up on the BPI’s RIAA like campaign and probably to help apply pressure with the negotiations with ISPs about dealing with illegal downloading of music (previous blog here). The downloading information has been provided by the BPI to Virgin Media according the BPI’s new page (here) – interesting given that the similar approach by the RIAA is coming under increasing legal questioning in the US.
The chief executive of the BPI told the BBC that the BPI in very bullish terms that if necessary the BPI will take the ISPs to court and win, including ISPs who will not participate in their actions such as Carphone Warehouse. This is also very reminiscent of the RIAA’s early campaign. It seems to me that the BPI have not looked at the way the US litigation for the RIAA is going which has resulted in both counter cases, a lot of embarrassing revelations about how the cases have been built. Not to mention that a number of US record executives and artists have been publicly disagreeing with the RIAA.
Interviews with a few of those affected so far suggests that Virgin Media may stand to lose subscribers as the perceived invasion of digital privacy talks hold, plus the ISP dictating how people can use the service that they’re paying for.
03 Thursday Jul 2008
Posted in economy
With more haulier protests in London yesterday over fuel prices and the rate of price inflation. Here is a new monthly graph of fuel prices based on the AA figures:
The critical values are that diesel has gone up 9.1% from last month and unleaded has increased by 6.3% since last month. Diesel is now averaging 13p per litre more expensive than unleaded.
02 Wednesday Jul 2008
Posted in General
Tags
It would appear that the SeeWhy press announcements about the latest publicly available version of SeeWhy are filtering out (e.g. webitpr | SeeWhy Announces Version 3.4 to Drive Online 1-to-1 Marketing )onto the Net. The announcements also reflect the current push into the Customer Experience Management (CEM) application of our real-time event processing platform.
As SeeWhy is an event engine with configured and configurable metrics it provides a very powerful offering that will allow simple measurement such as user experience (such as how well are page requests being serviced – in general and for key customers) all the way through to some significant business orientated metrics – website performance against hit to sale conversions trended over a time. Particularly when you add to this a highly customisable closed loop capabilities.
27 Friday Jun 2008
Posted in General, Technology
A lot of pressure has been applied by the government to ISPs and the music industry to sort out some sort of agreement over music downloads using P2P or face legislation. Well according to The Register (here) serious discussions between stake holders have been going on and an agreement maybe reached this year on how to address this.
The interesting thing is what will happen to legitimate services if you can use P2P solutions that are currently described as illegal if you can pay your ISP a normal sum each month. In addition to this how will this pool of money be divided up amongst royalty owners, as measuring the illegal P2P download activity for every individual is going to be pretty challenging particularly when people often go to the effort of concealing the nature of their web traffic e.g. packaging files in zipped & rar files that have passwords, file renaming etc tec.
Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog 