A learning resources technician in Southampton. I received my degree in Media Technology and use it to make cool streaming media things happen at the University of Southampton
// January 31st, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Personal
I haven’t watched an episode of Eastenders since… well never I think. But if you are like me then watch todays (Thursday) on the BBC iPlayer.
Find somewhere quiet, somewhere that no-one can see if you are sniffling into a hankie, and commit 30 minutes to it. The BBC at its very best.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b008vrpw.shtml (Will only work until 6/02/08)
// January 31st, 2008 // No Comments » // Modern Languages, iSolutions (ISS, Central IT)
A few posts ago I was talking about the work we’ve been doing with Flash and the D-Day that was coming up. Well this is the update to it.
Everyone was pretty happy with the result. We had a bunch of people connect from other universities and (more than I thought) bosses at ISS either had a look at the live stream or came down for the actual conference. I’ve also had to put together a flow chart for the institutions that have emailed the llas and asked how they did it as they want to do it too.
I’ve personally learnt a few lessons from it, the main one being sound. If you have a listen to the presentations (below or on the LLAS website) you can hear some distortion in the voices when they raise their voice. Of course we did all of the sound checks and everything sounded good, then they presented. Of course the voice of a presenter doing a sound check to one person and their voice when presenting to 100 is slightly different. Hell it’s a lot different. And because of the live encoding we’re stuck with what we’ve got.
Have a listen to it and see what you think, and maybe more importantly what you think of the Flash player; because that’s my work*
(I can’t seem to embed the video on this site, look at it here http://streaming.lang.soton.ac.uk/video/index.php?vidid=90a0d16&start=370)
* The bit that plays the video isn’t, that’s someone cleverer than me, but all the stuff around it is mine. Trouble is you can’t really see it as most of the application is security and this video doesn’t have much as it is public.
// January 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // Computing
I found out today that I have $22 dollars in my Google adsense account dispite not using the thing for 18 months. So I thought I’d put it back into the site. Of course I can’t see it as I use adblock plus, but you can click on it if you want.
I’ve also put in a new plugin to do code colouring. Might be useful if I even decide to share some code.
An example is below, from the flash video streamer I made at work
// January 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal
Amy is watching Poirot at the moment. There are lots of discs per series and lots of series.
Every single disc has a completly unskippable antipiracy warning on the front of it. I know that most discs have them but I haven’t found another that is totally unskippable.
I nearly agree with the message, but put the thing on the first disc only. It’s not hard and we aren’t going to skip a disc just to avoid the message.
The worst thing is that if you pirate the disc then you get rid of the message. What is the point of a message telling me to not steal films, when the only people that see it are the people who aren’t!
// January 24th, 2008 // No Comments » // Modern Languages
Tomorrow is going to be an exciting day. The LLAS have one of there sympodiums tomorrow that they are streaming live on the internet.
They are using Flash and the Flash Media Server to do this and it is the culmination of ideas from the subject centre, designs from their graphics people and a lot of programming in Flash from me. I mentioned that I did a lot of ActionScripting over Christmas, well this is the first big project that will use the things I’ve written.
The Flash movie has been tweaked, the Server has had 77 out of 150 people on it in the tests and hopefully there will be a good number on it. The live stream looks good and we’ve even sorted out some synchronised presentations to go with it (so the powerpoint is in crystal clear vector and the video can concentrate on the speaker).
This sort of thing has been done before, but I haven’t seen much of it done by the academic institutions. Most of the stuff I see is presenting one lecture theatre into another one when there isn’t enough chairs.
I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow. You might even want to watch it… but I don’t think many language teachers read this. Shame.
// January 23rd, 2008 // No Comments » // Computing
I don’t mean to fill this blog up with videos but this is damn amazing. This person has developed some software that uses a game console controller to track where your head is. When the screen knows where your head is it can move the display like a window.
Take a look, the demo starts at 2:30, but the introduction is worth watching
// January 22nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Funny
// January 14th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal
You may find it a little strange that someone with a blog be concerned about privacy but there is a reason. Here at mediaguy.co.uk I write everything myself. I decide whether I want the world to know it (public), just my family and friends (passwored) or no-one at all (walk away). But yesterday I got my first taste of Facebook’s Beacon.
I was playing a stupid little flash game on the internet when a little message saying ‘I’m sending this to facebook’. To be honest I thought it was just an advert trying to make me click on the ‘stop’ button and pop up an advert but signing on to facebook today I see that it was real.
Apparently I want to publish all the websites I go to onto my facebook page. Now I don’t know if you’ve seen my facebook page but it doesn’t have much on, it’s really nice. On the other hand there are plenty of people who’s facebook page has 35 applications and spans about 45 pages if you tried to print it. Every day my ‘minifeed’ is full of ‘Person 1 played a quiz. You can play it too!’ ‘Person 2 is like Chandler from Friends. Which Friend are you!’
So the next stage of facebook will be ‘Person 1 has just bought a book from Amazon’ ‘Person 2 has just bought new granny knickers from Marks and Spencers. Buy your underwear from M&S too!’ ‘Person 3 is browsing www.bbc.co.uk’ ‘Person 4 is browsing AdultFriendFinder.com for an affair. You can have an affair too!’.
Sales department: http://www.facebook.com/business/?beacon
Turn it off: http://soton.facebook.com/privacy.php?view=unconfirmed_actions
// January 5th, 2008 // No Comments » // Funny
Amy: He’s a funny man
Graham: Am I a funny man?
Amy: Of course you are. I look at you and laugh all the time.
// January 4th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal
Done by an actual professor this.
Copyright © 2010 Graham Robinson. All rights reserved.
