David Doran’s Media Blog

Joost

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Following on from the sale of Skype, creators Zennstrom and Friis
began a new venture codenamed “The Venice Project”.
Recently “The Venice Project” was announced re-branded as “Joost”.

The aim of Joost is to provide medium/high quality full-screen streaming
video but with the choice and ease of switching we are used to on our regular TVs.

I posted a plea on Irish Webmaster Forums for a Joost “Beta-Invite” (Joost is in closed Beta).
Kindly Paul sent me one without haste and I rushed

off to have a go.

The review (as of Joost Beta 0.9.2):

Video Streaming
I was pleasantly surpised by the video streaming ability.
While I don’t think it is full-screen quality (On my 27-inch it is pixelated unless watched from TV-distance) it is

an amazing step over the Youtube video size and yet it streams almost flawlessly. While I had a few intermittent

video pauses I believe it was because of my broadband latency at the moment.

Channel Switching
Would you wait 30 seconds to switch channel on your TV? No, I don’t think you would (unless you’re on Chorus).
This is the beauty of Joost. When you switch channel it typically takes between 5 and 15 seconds for the video to

start streaming (full screen mind) so it seems negligible-latency video could be around the corner.

Interface
I understand where the designers were coming from with the interface design. They wanted to show that the interface

is not between you and the video but rather the interface should only be there to change the video you are currently

watching. This makes sense doesn’t it? You don’t leave teletext or the menu up on your TV while you are watching.

However I find the current grey color scheme unappealing and rather dull.

Content Selection
Here’s where the service will succeed or fail - range of content. As of the beta Joost has managed to sign up some

slightly obscure channels and some bigger ones (MTV/WPT) but the major ones people want aren’t catered for.

Conclusion

If Joost keeps gaining momentum, securing providers and improving technology then the Joost investors have nothing to worry about. As for us users - I’m hoping they get some really good content and they keep advertisement lengths down (now up to 4 minutes on regular TV).

Posted in technology, news | 9 Comments »

BarCamp Dublin

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

A while back I saw a video of Donncha’s talk
at Barcamp South-East and so when I heard that
there was a Barcamp Dublin in the works naturally I
was intrigued.
There was a bit of hymning and hawing on my part because
for the most part face-to-face networking was something
I had little experience with, especially with professionals
of such a high standard.
In the end I decided there was nothing to lose and after getting
the bus half an hour later than I had planned (damn Journey Planner)
I found Barcamp at the Digital Exchange (thanks to a kindly place “Barcamp” sign).

I was too late for Eoin’s “Law of Blogs” talk but I still got to go along to some great ones, which included:

Darren Barefoot - Social Media Marketing

Darren Barefoot had an engaging and entertaining presentation that
had a perfect balance of information and humour. It was an added bonus
that Darren had a full crowd because the atmosphere was buzzing.

Eoghan McCabe - Web Usability 101

This was another talk that I couldn’t miss, and judging by the size of the crowd
either could anyone else. Eoghan basically ran through the “common sense”
element of design that, while seeming simple, makes a designer an expert if they can interpret what a user wants to do before even they know it. Eoghan’s choice of example site also spurred a very “lively” debate which started the day off nicely!

Paul Campbell - The choices that lead to rails

I decided to go the “Ruby/Rails” talk to see if Paul could present a new insight into Ruby/Rails
for someone who knows little but has heard much. Unfortunately, I must say, Paul understands Rails so well that he was unable to clearly convey to a Rails agnostic why exactly I want it without getting into code.

The Social Web Panel

The BarCamp Social Web 2.0 Panel consisted of Tom Raftery, Sean O Sullivan, Darren Barefoot and Karlin Lillington.
Overall the panel discussion was interesting as each panelist gave their personal view on the topic however I felt there was far too much time spent on what seemed like 2 questions in the hour.

Tom Raftery - CIX Energy Efficient Data-Centre

I must admit I quite liked this one because I
enjoyed a change from the airy-fairyness of social marketing
to solid numbers and pictures of this “ground-breaking” development.

General Comments

This was my first BarCamp and I have to say it was a very pleasant experience. Despite initially being slightly nervous I found the people I met such as David Behan, Richard Hearne, Robin Blandford, Cormac Moylan and David Rooney very friendly and very inclusive.

Although I don’t have first-hand experience of other BarCamps I think that the next one could be less formal (as is the BarCamp philosophy) since the setup of the panel created a sort of one-way platform instead of the traditional two-way conversation.

Finally, hats off to the organisers and to those I didn’t talk to: see you next time!

Posted in technology, news | 8 Comments »

Hiding and Cloaking

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

After the launch of the new Lily O’Briens site, designed by Magico a bit of a discussion arose around the site’s design (overall good) and specifically the SEO aspects of the site.

Richard Hearne of the SEO blog RedCardinal in his blog post Blind People Can’t Eat Chocolate highlighted that the site will not display anything in browsers it does not recognise.

In a follow-up post Richard reveals that for a period of time after the site going online the Google Bot was also blocked from the site.

Previous to Richard’s post (but after the site had been edited to accept GoogleBot) I set off to do a bit of investigating on what User-Agents Lily O’Briens would accept.
I hacked together, and then tidied up Hide-my-UA which allows you to choose a User-Agent to “pretend” to be and then browse around a site. Comments and suggestions welcome.

Posted in links, technology, php, projects | 1 Comment »

Learning Takes Time

Monday, February 12th, 2007

It was only today as I was looking over my site that I realised it was nearly 30 days since I last updated my blog.
I was amazed how quickly the time has passed and how blogging really takes time.
If you are looking for bloggers who really deserve credit then looking over the Blog Awards nominees
and voting for your favourites is well worth the time.

Richard Hearne (RedCardinal) has kindly offered a free SEO consultation for all of the nominees, which if even some of the participants avail of will take a considerable amount of time.
Undoubtedly though (and cleverly) each person who accepts Richard’s offer will drive an amount of traffic towards him and hopefully increase readership.

Along similar lines Eoghan McCabe (designer of AllFreeCalls.ie) is offering €2000 worth of his design work to a person who subscribes to his blog feed.

It must be the season for competitions and give-aways because as many in the blogo-sphere will know the second leg of Blog feeds subscriber race is soon to come to an end. (Oh, and Free Drinks are up for grabs)

Personally, I have done quite a bit in the past 29 days. I’ve been working on quite a few projects such as a CMS, a Flash/XML banner system and some other small website projects. The other web-dev related thing I spend a bit of time on is testing and benchmarking different approaches to problems so that the end result (and for future projects) is the most highly optimised solution, and the one which is best future-proofed.
Sometime in the past week I got the idea that maybe it would be a good time to revisit C++ and see if the concepts and complex facets of the language were any easier to understand. What I found suprising and incouraging was that most of the language now made sense and “fitted” (possibly because of my work with PHP) and even very tricky concepts such as “pointers” and “references” now made alot more sense.

When I get a bit more free time on my hands I plan to get some sort of portfolio or project dump up because I have way too much stuff just sitting here on my PC which isn’t seeing the light of day.

**NOTE: It appears wordpress decided to include old posts that I had deleted back into my feed. Oh well.

Posted in links, technology, news, projects | No Comments »

AJAXperiment

Saturday, December 2nd, 2006

Loading Bar

“AJAX“, is it a buzzword, methodology, technology or Web2.0-crapology?

It all depends on who you ask but I do think that when used properly, not excessively that a little bit of AJAX magic can do wonders.

I began thinking a little while back that I’d like to make a little tool to crawl a web page, check links, images, scripts etc. The problem with these things is that it takes time - too much time for a normal page, it would stall and die.

So, I thought it the perfect project to split up the jobs to be done and update the client as each of them are completed - I.E. a loading bar. What it does is split the requests to be done into chunks and then when the client’s side (AJAX) calls the server it processes a chunk and then updates the client again - simple.

It is by FAR not a completed tool, merely a fraction of what could be done. In reality it should check for Description tags, Author, check image ALT tags, check syntax etc.

Have a try here: Mini Page Checker

Please leave comments, suggestions, thoughts etc. if you like.

Posted in links, technology, news, php, projects | 3 Comments »

“Politics In Ireland” Suggestions

Sunday, November 12th, 2006

Ok, so Damien Mulley is running a bit of a contest to improve PoliticsInIreland.com and in an effort
to get some ideas on e-paper before others have them written (Ken has already penned some) here are some:

Remove the “Home” link which seems out of place. Link the header image to the hompage.
Change the “RSS Feed” link to an image link or add the RSS feed icon and place it somewhere better.
Remove the redundant “RSS v2″ link on the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. It is too far down and inconspicuous.
Make the initial page shorter and more condensed. The size is over 100KB which means >25 sec. download via dialup.
Try and provide some images or graphics (like party logos) for a more rich experience.
Highlight a post which is most popular that day.
Maybe just soften up the design with some CSS, coordinate colors etc..

Hope this helps the development of the site.

Posted in technology, trackback | 1 Comment »

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