chrisgreen.co.uk

OpenTech is over and we are now back at home.

In all yesterday’s conference provided a very interesting day of sessions. I learned a great deal about the thinking within the BBC. In particular regarding time-shift television, compression, distribution systems and content on-demand.

One negative point to add about the event - at an early session I agreed to help out with a demo, on account of being an iPod Shuffle owner. It turns out the demo was just the idiot of a presenter taking everyone’s 512MB Shuffle units, mixing them up in a box and handing them back at random to the five of us who had volunteered - the idea being that if you didn’t like the content on the Shuffle you were handed, you could nuke it. If any of you have not seen a Shuffle - there is nothing on them to distinguish them from one another on account of the Shuffle having no screen.

The presenter thought this was highly amusing; I on the other hand did not. He failed to consider that many Shuffle owners use them as USB storage sticks as well as an MP3 player. Also, My new, immaculate Shuffle was replaced with a scratched and battered one. Hardly like for like!

Anyway - after some very precise complaints were lodged, event organiser Dave Green was quick to offer to fund a replacement - a very professional response. However, he also made efforts to try and reunite the five victims with their original Shuffle units - and luckily I managed to hook up with the person who had mine, and as luck would have it, I had his. It transpired that of the five of us, one was actually given his own one back from the box, and the other pair who had theirs mixed up never reappeared. Guess they liked what they got on their second-hand units? I eventually received an apology from the presenter responsible for the utterly stupid Shuffle stunt at the end of the day.

Back to the event, we learned a great deal about Internet-inspired counterculture as well, everything from holding flash mob parties on the Circle Line to using camera phones to stalk Home Secretary Charles Clarke. We saw a dual-booting iPod with Linux on it, prototypes for digital TV recorders, we bought some cheap books from O’Reilly, we saw just how much of our lives now exist in the open thanks to the web and we got an insight into some of the future developments coming out of Yahoo.

In all - a very thought-provoking experience. I look forward to next year’s event.

Still at OpenTech, and preceeding the talk from the Yahoo guy on open source, I stood witness to living proof that geeks hunt in packs.

The yahoo guy was nice enough to bring with him a couple of handfuls of the much sought-after Flickr logo stickers. I secured one before anyone noticed them on the table, but as soon as the assembled masses realised what they were, there was a rush to the front, like teenagers at a boy band concert, and in a flash - all gone.

Except for one sticker, which remained. An eagle-eyed attendee lept from his seat, bounded up to the stage to grab it, caught his leg in a microphone cable, sending him and the mic flying!

Still at OpenTech, now sitting in the main session of the day - the launch of backstage.bbc.co.uk, a new initiative by the Beeb to allow and encourage developers to use BBC information and content feeds within their applicatons.

The BBC is exposing the necessary APIs, and allowing developers to retain intellectual property rights over their creations (though the BBC still holds rights over their content feeds of course). They are also making extensive use of RSS feeds to achieve this.

Have a look at the site, I think you will be very interested. It is also good to see the BBC doing something really challenging and technology-changing with the licence fee.

Just been alerted to a small problem with my RSS feed, in that they were failing to show any content for my site. I appear to have fixed this now, but if anyone is still having a problem, please let me know.

If you are using something like Feeddemon or Newsgator, you might need to delete the RSS bookmark for my site and re-enter it.

Thanks!

Greetings from the conference hall at OpenTech, a one-day technology and general geeky conference talking place in West London at Imperial College.

Currently sitting through a fascinating session about living in the open - which is rather ironic as I am posting this to a public blog

More later…….

http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2005

Microsoft has announced the release name for its next version of the Windows client operating system, previously codenamed Longhorn.

It will be known as: Windows Vista

WTF - that has to be one of the most uninspiring names yet, possibly worse that using numbers to differentiate the versions. When will Microsoft learn from the rest of the industry, many of whom have come to terms with the fact that interesting product names help sell software and keep users interested.

Look at Apple - its previous versions of OS X have kept their codenames as part of the release name: Tiger, Panther, Jaguar and so on.

Windows Longhorn would have been a great release name for the product - Microsoft has really missed a marketing opportunity here, and I am greatly disappointed.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jul05/07-22LHMA.mspx

Information remains unclear, and official sources (Police, Medical and Fire Service) are so far failing to confirm or deny anything, but we do know that there are three incidents, most likely some form of low-yield explosions, on three Tube trains, one on the Hammersmith & City Line in Shepherds Bush - West London, another at Oval Station on the Northern Line and a third on a Victoria Line train at Warren Street.

All three incidents happened at the same time, roughly two and a half hours ago, and are joined by a fourth incident on a bus in Hackney, although a statement from the bus operator Stagecoach suggests that only minor damage was caused, and the bus was not destroyed in the same way as the bus that was bombed on July 7th.

London Underground are temporarily shutting the Tube network, and emergency services have erected exclusion zones around all four alleged bomb sites. Chemical specialists have been confirmed as attending the scene of the Warren Street incident.

1430: UK Government’s emergency-response team Cobra meets at Downing Street, with Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw attending.

1413: Prime Minister Tony Blair postpones a visit to a school in east London and a photocall with visiting Prime Minister John Howard of Australia, a spokesman says.

1411: Police cordon off University College Hospital, Reuters news agency reports.

1401: A White House spokesman says the US is “monitoring the situation closely”.

1354: Police say they are not treating the evacuations as a “major incident yet”.

1348: Westminster Underground station is evacuated.

1342: Police respond to reports of an explosion on a Number 26 bus in Hackney Road in east London.

1340: Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, cancels an engagement because of the incident on the Underground, a spokeswoman says.

1325: London Underground announces services suspended on three lines, Hammersmith & City, Victoria and Northern.

1321: Fire service says smoke seen coming from Warren Street Tube station.

1320: The pound sterling falls against other currencies as word of the incidents hits the markets. The index of leading shares on London’s stock exchange also falls.

1311: Shepherd’s Bush station on the Hammersmith and City line is evacuated.

1245: Ambulance services are called to the Warren Street station on the Northern and Victoria lines. The station is evacuated.

1238: Ambulance services are called to the Oval Underground station on the Northern Line. The station is evacuated.

After many months of false starts, it looks like the iTunes phone is going to get a public release.

Motorola will host and webcast a “media event” on July 25. The event - which is billed by the company as: “Motorola unveiling what’s wow and what’s now” - will be hosted by company chairman and chief executive Ed Zander, and is widely rumoured to also include an appearance by Apple chief Steve Jobs.

The first UK network set to go with the phone is Virgin Mobile, which in turn is set to launch the phone on its network at the forthcoming”V” music festival, founded by Virgin Mobile owner Sir Richard Branson and sponsored by the mobile operator.

Ok - so here’s the dilemma. I’ve just signed up, and been accepted, for the Google Adsense scheme. Now, keep in mind that I have literally sod-all coding know-how, I could do with some help as to how I can actually add in the ad-code into my site.

Anyone want to offer some advice. I’m looking to add a single strip of add along the very top of the page.

Thanks
Chris