Newstocks

Citizen journalism

Jay Rosen has posted a great, pithy definition of citizen journalism.

"When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism."

After the difficulty I had yesterday finding out what was going on with the Causeway, I'm again thinking about how to apply this here. What could be set up in Bermuda to allow ordinary people to inform each other about what's going on, without the need to wait for the middle-man (i.e. the media)?

I'm not just thinking about "disaster" scenarios like hurricanes and so on, I'm thinking about how this could be used for all news reporting (even hyper-local stuff that wouldn't even make it into the Royal Gazette, like which kid won the running race at the Francis Patton sports day).

Some things to think about:

• How do you maximise the uptime and timeliness of the service?
• How do you persuade people to contribute, and how do they do so?
• How do you keep out the trolls?
• How do you present the information in a digestible way?

I have a few ideas, which I'm exploring, but I'd be interested to hear yours too. Could something like this work here?

Suggestions wanted

After spending the last few weeks building an application to manage the bookings and admin for Mandy's swim program, this weekend it finally reached beta quality. Mandy is now using it for the bookings she's taking for August, so I'm hoping that there are no nasty bugs in any of my code that might cause any data loss.

I'm still struggling to come up with a good name for it though. When I wrote a similar application for managing the stock at Godet & Young I came up with the name GYPSUM, which a) sounded cool, b) was the name of something associated with a hardware store and c) actually stood for something (Godet and Young Product and SUpplier Management).

The best I've managed so far for Mandy's program in SIMS (Swimming Instinct Management System), but I don't really like it. It's not the name of anything associated with swimming, doesn't really sound that cool (needs more syllables, I think) and it reminds me too much of a crappy video game.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Disqus

I'm experimenting with a new commenting system for this blog called Disqus.

It's exactly the kind of thing that I wish I'd had when I was running A Limey In Bermuda. Why?

• You can rate other people's comments (with automatic hiding of comments that score too low).
• You can edit your own comments after posting them.
• You can add a gravatar (a picture) to all your comments, to make it easier for people to recognise you.
• You can keep track of all the comments you have left on this site (and any others that use Disqus) in a single place.
• I can provide per-comment RSS feeds.
• I can display comments in threads, to make conversations easier to follow.
• You and I can both reply to comments on our content via email, and have those replies appear as comments on the site.

And a whole bunch of other great stuff besides. It even made me briefly think about restarting LiB, with comments, just so I could use it in anger!

The main downside seems to be that Disqus comments are not indexed by Google et al, so you can't use the site search to find them.

Let me know what you think.

Making progress

Made quite a bit of progress in GTA IV yesterday, getting another 10% or so further through the game. I reckon I've got about the same to go again before finishing the main story, after which I'll probably leave it and go play something else. Compulsive completer-finisher I may be, but there are just too many other games out there vying for my attention now.

Yesterday aside, I've now spent the last eight days writing my program for Mandy. In that time I've only left the house three times, and never ventured further than Ferry Reach. Starting at 9am and working until 11pm most days, I've been working harder than I do when I'm at work.

I've made good progress, but there remains a lot to do. It's proven to be a much more complicated piece of software than the inventory management system I wrote for Godet & Young, and I think I underestimated the amount of work involved. I've learned a fair bit about data binding in .NET and SQL Server Reporting Services in the process, though. The data binding stuff has proved considerably trickier than Microsoft make it out to be in their introductory videos, and I've run into several problems that I've struggled (and in some cases, am still struggling) to fix. I'm now going to have to work evenings and weekends to finish it.

As usual when developing, I've been doing a lot of swearing, but overall I've been feeling less stressed than I normally get at work. I think that's because at home I have at least been able to work uninterrupted, whereas at work I'm constantly getting emails and phone calls from people who need me to do stuff for them, which makes getting into a state of flow almost impossible. It's times like this when I appreciate the advantages an office with a door has over open plan.

Busman's holiday

I'm taking this week off work to write a piece of software to help Mandy manage her summer swim program.

To speed development, I'm writing it in VB.NET, the same language I use at work. As the only licence I have for the full version of Microsoft Visual Studio (for those who don't know, Microsoft Visual Studio is the tool I use to write software, in the same way that Microsoft Word is the tool you might use to write a letter) is for an old version, I've opted to use Visual Studio 2008 Express instead. This is a free, but cut-down, version of the program, which hopefully will be enough for my needs. Unlike the full version, however, it doesn't include Crystal Reports, the tool I usually use to generate reports. Because of that I'm using SQL Server 2005 Express as the database (a free, cut-down version of SQL Server 2005), which gives me the ability to use SQL Server Reporting Services to produce reports instead. It also means I don't have to use Access as the database.

The downside of using all these free tools, apart from the lack of some features I'm used to, is that I'm not that familiar with them. In particular, I've never used Reporting Services to produce reports before, so there's a bit of a learning curve to go through. On the upside, the knowledge I gain could prove useful at work too.

The other problem with Visual Studio Express is that it doesn't support add-ons, which means I'm unable to use the excellent Resharper with it. This is a tool which makes the job of writing code easier, by providing some additional features not available in Visual Studio. I've only just started using it at work, but I'm already missing having to code without it.

Hopefully I can quickly get to grips with everything and have Mandy a working program by the end of the week.

Microsoft search: you couldn't pay me to use it

I've yet to meet a Microsoft search tool that I like. Without exception, they're slow and ineffective, and I avoid them as much as I can. I use Copernic for desktop search instead of Vista's built-in facility, Google for searching the web, and GMail's web-based search when I need to find a message in my personal email accounts. The only time I rely on a Microsoft tool for is for searching my work email in Outlook 2007. Unfortunately that refuses to look in most of my mail folders due to some obscure indexing problem that, despite my best efforts, I have been unable to fix.

So the news that Microsoft is going to start effectively paying people who buy things they find through Microsoft's Live Search (but only in the US, natch) made me laugh. OK, so companies give cash incentives to use their products all the time, but when it's a Microsoft search product that's involved it's hard not to be scornful.

To PS3 or not to PS3?

Against my better judgement, I've again found myself thinking about buying a PS3.

Pros:

• It's the only BD-Live Blu-ray player currently available.
• It can play back DivX- and XviD-encoded video. Like torrented Battlestar Galactica, for example.
• Apparently it can play games too. Including some you can't get on the PC (Guitar Hero I'm looking at you). Plus, the prospect of playing games on a big screen is quite enticing.

Cons:

• Price. I'm guessing between $600 and $800 in Bermuda.
• Selection of Blu-ray movies is a bit rubbish right now.
• Hi-def torrents seem to be mostly encoded in X264, which the PS3 can't play (at least, not without a lot of frigging around). And I don't know if the standard def, XviD-encoded ones will look any better than Cablevision.
• Selection of games isn't as good as, say, the Xbox 360. Although as I wouldn't be buying it for the games (and certainly not first-person shooters, which need mouse-look), that's no big deal.
• It's a console. Sellout.

Any console owners out there have any thoughts?

Me and my BBC Micro

Apropos of my previous post, my parents dug out this old picture of me and my BBC Micro, the home computer we had when I was a kid. Note the cassette recorder hooked up to it - the 1980s version of today's DVD drive (this was back in the days before DVDs, CDs, or even 3 1/2 inch floppy drives)! It's obviously a staged photo since there's no TV in sight (we didn't have a proper computer monitor for some years, as I recall). But still... happy days!

Remembering the BBC Micro

The news that the creators of the BBC Micro are getting together again this week at London's Science Museum has got me feeling all nostalgic.

The BBC Micro was the machine that started my love-affair with computers (if you exclude the Commodore PETs that I occasionally got to play with at school). I can still clearly remember the day I came home from school one Wednesday afternoon (for some reason, in my junior school we got Wednesday afternoons off) to find this wondrous new machine that my dad had brought home.

Initially, we mainly used it for playing games (the early Acornsoft titles being the ones that stick out in my mind: Snapper, Monsters, Planetoid, Rocket Raid and, of course, Elite). But it was also the machine that I did my first programming on, the listings for one of my games even appearing in a national computer magazine (back in the days when computer magazines printed program listings instead of putting the compiled game on a cover disc). Indeed, it was probably responsible for the career that I'm following today.

I'd love to be able to give Aidan a similarly wonderful experience when he's a bit older. But sadly, I think the world is a different place today. The BBC Micro was one of the first home computers, but now, of course, they're commonplace, as are gaming consoles. And I think that writing even a simple game on a PC today would be a lot harder than it was back then on the BBC Micro.

Our first Apple TV movie rental

Just finished watching our first movie rental using the Apple TV: the HD version of Michael Clayton.

The picture was pretty good - the stubble on George Clooney's face seemed particularly sharp - but without the SD version to do a direct comparison with, it was difficult to tell whether it was sufficiently better to justify the additional $1 premium. That said, the HD version did come with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround surround too.

I set it downloading when I went to bed at midnight last night, and by 8am this morning, it was done. That was much faster than I was expecting, although the movie was only 2 hours long.

At $5 for a new release, it's a little pricey compared to the $2.50 you'd pay to rent a DVD from Leisure Time, but the convenience, and the absence of any late fees (which we inevitably end up paying when we rent a movie at the weekend) just about compensate, I think.

As for the movie itself, we enjoyed it, but thought the plot was entirely predictable.

Waiting for Blu-ray

It seems that now is actually a pretty bad time to buy a Blu-ray player. Prices are going up due to the lack of competition from HD DVD and no existing players are yet "Profile 2.0" compatible (which adds internet connection capability and larger local storage to the features offered by the current generation of "Profile 1.1" players). There's also talk about current Blu-ray titles being re-released with advanced profile features at a later date.

I could buy a Playstation 3, which is the only current Blu-ray player which will be upgradeable to Profile 2.0 with just a software update. It's also relatively cheap, particularly when you consider it can play games too. But navigating the menus with a game controller seems a bit naff and besides, I harbour a pathological hatred for consoles of all varieties, PC gaming snob that I am.

So waiting seems like the most sensible option, albeit the most dull.

No Blu-ray rentals for now

It seems that Bermuda's DVD rental stores aren't planning to offer Blu-ray rentals any time soon.

This lunchtime I popped in to both Movies 2 Go and Leisure Time to ask whether they intended to offer Blu-ray rentals in the near future. Despite both stores having a small selection of Blu-ray discs for sale, both told me that rentals would not be happening any time soon, saying that there would need to be many more owners of Blu-ray players in Bermuda before it became feasible.

Fair enough, I suppose. But uptake surely isn't being helped by the fact that Blu-ray players almost impossible to find on the island right now. M&M are out of stock and Electronics City only have a single older Panasonic model (moreover, when I asked if they were bringing in the latest model, which seems to be regarded as the best Blu-ray player right now, they told me no).

Here's hoping that it won't be too long before the situation improves.

A new TV

Ever since I graduated from university, I've dreamed about owning a big widescreen TV.

For my first few working years I was renting a tiny room in a house, and I had to put up with the owner's choice of TV. It wasn't until I finally moved into my own place in London that I was able to get a widescreen set, but it was only a 32" CRT, and it weighed a ton.

When Mandy and I moved to Bermuda, to my great regret I had to revert to a 4:3 set, as none of the local stores sold widescreen models(the US being somewhat behind Europe in this respect). It wasn't until yesterday that I finally bought myself the widescreen TV of my dreams: a 46" HD Sony KDL-46XBR4.

That model is reckoned to be one of the best LCD HDTV's on the market right now, and so far I've been very pleased with it. Although I don't have any HD content to try on it yet (a Blu-ray player is going to be my next purchase, when M&M can get some back in stock), DVDs and content from the iTunes store look great on it. Even regular cable isn't too bad.

The only gripe I have so far is the set's auto-dimming "feature" - when the screen is mostly black, it dims the backlight (presumably to produce deeper blacks), brightening it when more content appears on screen. In the situations where this is an issue (credits at the end of movies, for example, or the screensaver on the Apple TV), the switch in brightness is noticeable and extremely annoying. Unfortunately, there's no way to directly turn it off - instead, I've had to do so indirectly by turning Game/Text Mode on. This works, but you lose certain other features of the TV, such as noise reduction. I'm still deciding whether the loss of these is worth it or not.

I might also consider signing up for Cablevision's HD service now, despite the relatively limited channel selection, were it not for the fact that I dread dealing with their piss-poor customer service.

One thing I will be doing more of, however, is downloading TV shows from iTunes. Lost, for example, is currently showing on Cablevision on a channel where all the sound comes out of one speaker (and has been for weeks), and the picture quality is a poor 4:3 image. In contrast, not only does the downloaded version have better picture and sound, it's also available in widescreen format. Well worth $1.99 per episode.

Apple TV

Picked up a 40GB Apple TV when I was in Atlanta.

It's a sweet little device, that lets you stream your iTunes audio and video content from your PC to your TV. We often buy episodes of TV shows from the iTunes store (usually when our DVR fails to record them for whatever reason, or we miss the start of a new series), so now we'll be able to watch them on the big screen in the comfort of the living room. It also makes it easy to play all our music on the living room stereo, and even internet radio too. There are a bunch of other nice features too, like the ability to browse photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube directly on the TV, and easy access to movie trailers.

Setting it up hasn't been plain sailing, however. When iTunes tried to sync the first episode of Heroes to the Apple TV, it crashed iTunes and blue-screened the PC. Not good. I had to work around this by disabling automatic synchronisation, and manually excluding Heroes from the list of TV shows to sync. I can live with this, but it's irritating.

The other problem was with Radiohead's In Rainbows. For some reason it synced the album metadata over OK, but when I tried to play any of the tracks on the Apple TV, I got an error message, even though they all played fine in iTunes. While trying to fix the problem, the Apple TV back-synced the album to iTunes, rendering the album unplayable there too. So I deleted it from iTunes and plugged my iPod in, expecting it to copy the album back into iTunes from the iPod. Instead it just deleted the content from the iPod. That was when I discovered I didn't have a backup of the album anywhere. In the end I had to download a new copy of the album from BitTorrent, import that into iTunes, then resync the Apple TV and my iPod.

The other issue is that video content doesn't play back properly on our 4:3 TV (it gets stretched vertically to fill the screen). I knew this would probably be a problem when I bought the Apple TV, however. The solution? A trip to M&M tomorrow morning to buy a large, flat-panel widescreen HDTV. I've been looking for an excuse to buy such a beast for a while, and I'm happy that the Apple TV has furnished me with one!