New Zealand Microsoftie Nigel Parker had a demo slot to fill at the WEB09 event and, after a chat with a colleague, decided to use crowd sourced images tagged as New Zealand to promote our beautiful country. The embedded video is the result of his frantic 3 days work where he used these images to present a truly stunning example of what a mix of Siverlight, Photosynth and SmoothStreaming video can do.

NZsynth Demo shown in the Keynote at WEB09 from Nigel Parker on Vimeo.

You can read more of the detail here on his blog, and he’s certainly worth a follow on twitter or friendfeed.

Mad props Nigel – incredibly awesome stuff.

Okay, I’ve been sitting on this for awhile but, while I’m still to angry about the changes to post objectively just yet, I thought I’d link in some other commentaries.

• New Zealand’s copyright minister starts screaming – Boing Boing (Cory Doctorow)
• Ministers: why we changed the Copyright Act – Colin Jackson
• Weightless economy? Yeah, right – Colin Jackson
• Section 92a – the scariest law to ever be introduced into NZ? – Steve Biddle
• The broken Section 92A of the New Zealand copyright law – Mauricio Freitas
• Fair Copyright for New Zealand: No Section 92a – Facebook Group
• New Zealand’s copyright minister starts screaming when asked whether it’s fair to cut people off from the Internet on the basis of three unsubstantiated accusations of copyright infringement – The Current Buzz
• ICT Industry Moves To Address Copyright Confusion – Scoop
• Section 92A – Hairy Geek
• Parliament may kill our Internet – KnowIT
• Guilty till proven innocent: New Zealand copyright act – Brenda Wallace
• Say good bye to freedom on the internet – was nice while it lasted – Brenda Wallace

I encourage you all to follow the links, read up on what this could mean to internet users in New Zealand, and to make some noise! (it is election year after all)

A friend of mine wrote a post pondering the believability of images now that digital capture tools and manipulation programs are so accessible to whomever wants them. Specifically he raised the question also raised by newsweek in this article. Dale went on to ask the question “what about photos of – say – someone committing a crime? Useless in a court of law?”

I think his concerns were addressed by other commenters, but the question got me to thinking, and that started off what ended up being something of an epic comment of my own, which I’ll repost here to remind me to return to this subject later after a bit more research as it’s quite an interesting issue that Dale has raised.

(more…)

While I haven’t played with MythTV for quite awhile, I was pretty excited to learn that the Mythbuntu project has released their latest update to bring themselves into line with the 7.10 Gutsy release.

I’m going to download an ISO of the latest build to try out on one of my machines at home – I’ve got a wee plan for a possible front end client machine already <insert evil cackling>

I’ve just finished giving a presentation at the Conferenz ‘Digital Media & Content Summit’ in Auckland. While it was a lot of work putting the presentation and supporting document together, I found it quite a rewarding experience to be able to capture my thinking on the subject of Digital Entertainment.
The conference organisers are publishing my whitepaper and presentation notes on their website, but I felt it would be appropriate to also distribute them here to gain additional feedback on the topic.

• Whitepaper – Digital Entertainment (PDF 178KB)
• Presentation – From the Studio to the Home (PDF 6907KB)
• Conference Brochure (PDF 443KB)

So please feel free to download the documents, have a read, and let me know what you think. This is open source thinking, but an example of what I’m doing in my current role.
Note also the disclaimers in the documents, this is not a company policy statement, it is “free thinking” around what the future could look like and what challenges and opportunities exist therein.

Please note that the presentation is a ‘Notes View’ of a Microsoft Powerpoint slide pack and as such doesn’t have the transitions or builds of the slides, so things will look a little.. strange. I did try to host this on Slideshare, but it doesn’t handle builds either so, let me know if you have ideas as to where it can be hosted to represent the actual run through.

Todays entry was sparked by a story from WoW Insider, one of many sites which features in my RSS feeds. The column, from Azeroth Interrupted, tells a story of two brothers who are using the WoW universe to reunite and learn about what has happened in the many years that they have been seperated.

This got me to thinking of my own WoW interactions (I use that word because it scares me less than the ‘addiction’ word ). I’ve been playing for little over a year now and have made many friends, some of them quite close and most of them I’ve never met in real life. My collegue Karen started around that same time as me (in fact, she babysat me through the Night-Elf starting zone and explained the acronyms that everyone was using) and we are both Guild Masters (well GM2’s) in our guild Searing Sun (Guild Site / Armory Profile). It’s been loads of fun and we’ve even got my wife to play after much initial reluctance – and now she’s loving it! (and hating it, pretty standard feelings for most WoW players I think). Anyway, on the back of this ‘getting to know each other’ story, I started reflecting on the relationships that I’ve made in the game. There was the husband and wife team who invited me to their guild whose marrage since dissolved (along with the guild), there was the annoying twink guy who bugs my banker toon whenever I log in to check my auctions with continual duel requests, and there’s my other family – the people in my (our) guild. Things in our World of Warcraft guild have taken a turn of late, and I too must admit to starting to become disengaged once more…

Backtracking a little for context, WoW is a game which used to have a level cap at 60 (i.e. you could get to Level 60 and that was it, no more levels for you – go kill some super l33t monsters to get awesome gear so you can… kill some more super l33t monsters).
At this point a number of our high level players branched off to for an ‘Elite’ guild so those characters could focus on end-game raiding. Things get pretty serious in these kinds of guilds as people are solely focussed on gear and, due to the difficulty of the monsters you must now face, mistakes by anyone can kill the whole party. We stayed in our guild, happily helping out the lower levels get to 60, and building our own alts (other characters). Then came the release of the Burning Crusade, with a level cap of 70 and a whole new world to explore and better gear to get. The ‘Elite’ guild had imploded by this stage due to a number of reasons, but mainly due to the personality issues between the members of the guild, some who were taking things too seriously, some who just wanted to enjoy their game. These guild members all went off to join other guilds, and we got a number of them returning ‘home’ to us. With their experience and drive, we all started heading to 70, then trying to get the reputation and quests needed so we could all head to the big scary end game zones (where the cool gear drops). We found ourselves getting ‘too serious’ and we’d lost the culture of assistance which we’d previously been so proud of. Our guild master (mistress?) pulled the plug on the drive toward raiding, asking us to focus on recovering our previous culture. Interestingly, the week after she did this we started getting a large number of new recruits, I started back on leveling up my priest alongside my wife (who also plays) and all was well… almost.
The people who were looking forward to raiding (and I count myself amonst that number) started to leave, unrelated reasons of course, we lost our main tank (MT) and main healer (MH) to another guild on another server where they were going to meet up with their friends from school, our Raid Leader soon followed them, others left for raiding guilds within our own server. The interesting thing was, by and large, most of them left one or more of their alts in our guild, so they could come back and say hi. Our raid leader even went so far as to create an identical character to the one who had left, albeit without the level 70ishness and the funky gear

And now, on our guilds forum is a posting from our guild master – she too has left the server to follow her friends. She has been the rock on which the guild has been built and the glue which has held it together. Following her announcment, we lost 2 more of our high level players to the same server and it will be interesting to watch and see how the guild reacts to the news over the next few weeks and months. It’s with a heavy heart that I watch the changes which are happening to my group of close, but virtual friends – What started out as an investigation into the psyche of MMOGs and the people who play them has almost become a lifestyle. I am missing the people who have left already and am tempted, if they don’t plan on playing their alts too often, to start looking for a new home myself – time will tell, we’ll wait and see.

Given the work I’ve been doing over the last few years in the DVR/PVR/Television space, I’m now being (rightly or wrongly) sought out by my friends and family for advice as to what to buy when they’re replacing their Television sets. I’ve written an entry on this previously, but figure it’s probably worth another post as my thinking on the matter solidifies.

I’m of the opinion (which is subject to change pending convincing technical arguments, or a Lotto win) that buying an HD set is a good idea, but not worthy of sinking the kids education fund into at the moment as there are still a number of up and coming technologies (aren’t there always?) which require serious consideration.

So – my current response to inquirers is “get an HD set, and make sure it can do HD, but don’t spend too much as you’ll be wanting to replace the unit in around 5 years when OLED or SED make it to market, and HDMI 1.3 (or whatever supersedes that) becomes commonplace.”

The biggie here is to make sure the screen does what you’ve asked for as sales people seem to be economical with the truth and, while being technically correct, HD ready and actual HD display can be different. To this end, I’ve added a resolution table to the end of my ‘Getting High‘ post which you should check off against to ensure your display will do what you want it to. Once you’ve established the resolution you want to run, for goodness sake – make sure the set includes an HDMI port which inturn needs to support the HDCP content protection ’standard’ – otherwise you’ll end up with a device on your wall which can display HD content, but no HD content which is broadcast (or purchased as a HD-DVD/Blu-Ray/Whatever) will be allowed to get sent to it. There’s some links in the last sentence there – follow them and get informed so at least you know what you’re talking about when the sales guy in the local electronics store tries to tell you about high-definition.

Well, this week my RSS reader finally picked up the first show from ‘The Epic‘, this isn’t a news and views shows like my favorite WoW podcast audiocast ‘The Instance‘, but probably worth a listen to as their intention is to cover more in-game strategies. Their first show sounds… well, like a first show, the presenters talk over each other, the show lacks structure and their site is REALLY hard to find as the site doesn’t appear to have any form of search engine optimisation done on it, so good luck if Googling – you may be better off following the link in this post

If you’re a PvPer then you may enjoy the long discussion about the new honour system, they discuss mods (or the lack of them) and chat about the new patch – in their special first show fragmented kind of way. I think I’ll perservere with listening, at least for a few more shows and hopefully in that time they’ll find their feet and the presenters will lose their uncontrollable urge to make comments and talk over each other (blah blah blah Sophia blah blah blah me me me…).

Anyway, a good first effort – I can’t really complain too much as I’ve not got off my a$$ to do an audiocast which may or may not be better, so good on the crew from The Epic – I await your next show with great expectation.

Edit 18/02/2008: Still waiting… mind you, I’m no better, I’m transitioning my WoW blog which never really happened back to my main blog location.

For those who are interested, here are the RSS feedlinks for WoW Audiocasts I listen to:

• The Epic
• The Instance
• Taverncast
• World of Podcast

Oh – and for my fellow guildies RDiva, Cyd and the other ladies of the guild… be sure to check out Women of Warcraft

In the continuing saga of the MPAA riding roughshod over the general public comes this wonderful article via my friend Trev which covers the latest lobbying of congress by the MPAA.

Dan Glickman want to regulate things before they get too far out of hand and the MPAA loses control like they have with online sharing of copyrighted information. “We have a right to know what’s showing in a theatre.” says Glickman. If passed by congress (the same group of people see the internet as a bunch of “tubes” [MP3]), this would see home theatre equipment manufactured in the future requiring technology to directly inform the MPAA of what was being shown and specific details fo the audience. You’ll need some motion sensors and biometric technology to help them out with this too.

Now, for those of you who are thinking that your setup isn’t flash enough to be defined as a home theater, get this – the MPAA defines a home theatre as:

“… any home with a television larger than 29″ with stereo sound and at least two comfortable chairs, couch, or futon. Anyone with a home theatre would need to pay a $50 registration fee with the MPAA or face fines up to $500,000 per movie shown.”

Glickman (and by extension, the MPAA) doesn’t believe that you should be able to buy a DVD and invite people (including your own family) to watch it as it denies them the revenue they would have otherwise generated. He concedes that since it’s not feasible to expect everyone to have their own copy of a DVD, that the ‘registration fee’ is a “fair compromise”.

Oh – if this has you shaking your head in disgust and vowing never to upgrade your gear to this new ‘enhanced capability’ equipment, the bill also seeks to ensure that existing home theatres be retrofitted with the same technology, unless the owner is willing to take responsibility for directly informing the MPAA and receiving approval before each viewing.

Thank goodness I live in New Zealand and not America and our government won’t be swayed by such ridiculous notions… oh, hang on… bugger.

Heh – it must be a sign, just a few minutes after posting my first entry in this blog, my RSS feed catcher popped up this story from Gizmodo.

The PC costs US$1495 and it’s main selling feature is a funky network card designed to improved network performance… SERIOUSLY people, your home network is unlikely to be presenting you with much if anything in the way of lag, the problem lies past your sphere of influence and 30 or so hops away across the vast wasteland of routers and switching gear which makes up that magical thing we like to call the interweb.

But still, if you’ve got the money and like the look… purchase away.

Sheesh.