Podcasting Lectures at the U of A

Post ImageDuane Szafron is a Computing Sciences professor at the University of Alberta. He’s also a podcaster. Sadly, being both a podcaster and a professor is currently a fairly rare combination, but I hope the work of Szafron and others will change that:

“I think it makes it harder for people who give fairly boring lectures. I think more students won’t show up for those,” he said. “And I guess my attitude [as a professor] is, if you can’t deliver anything extra than what you would provide online or whatever, then what’s the difference if people don’t show up for class? Is that really bad if people don’t show up?”

Spot on! I’ve written before about podcasting and boring lectures, and I completely agree with Professor Szafron. Recorded audio and video lectures are not a replacement for class time, they are a complement.

It sounds like Szafron’s podcasts have been a hit, at least based on an informal survey of his students. Currently he makes lectures available in MP3 format, though he apparently experimented with video as far back as 1999. Both have their place, but I think audio is a much more appropriate format for lectures – they are easy to listen to on the bus, train, or while doing something else.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we might be able to help educational institutions take advantage of podcasting. Maybe I’ll have to pay Professor Szafron (who I never had as a prof) and his colleagues a visit!

Read: The Gateway

Fifth generation Archos to support H.264

Post ImageI’ve learned a lot about portable media players in the last year or so, mostly as a result of Podcast Spot. We convert audio and video files to a variety of different formats, so it’s useful to know which devices support which formats. I admit I was shocked to learn that current Archos devices only support H.264 video and AAC audio with an optional $20 USD plug-in. The website is kind of misleading about it too.

Looks like that might get fixed. Engadget has been exploring rumors about the next generation devices from Archos:

Nevertheless, GenerationMP3 was able to snag a screenshot of more details surrounding the PMPs, so here’s what we know now. The 405 will supposedly accept both miniSD and micro SD cards, support MPEG2/3/4, WMV, H.264, and AAC formats, play nice with JPEG, BPM, and PNG photos, and weigh 146 grams.

I hope that “support” as used above really means “support without additional software required.” The devices that Archos makes are fairly impressive, but the whole plug-in thing just grinds my gears.

Read: Engadget

Back to high school to congratulate Mr. Rice

Yesterday I took a trip down memory lane and revisited my old high school, McNally. I’ve been back a few times since graduating in 2001, but yesterday’s trip had a very specific purpose – I went to congratulate my old principal, George Rice, on his retirement. I found out this was his last year a few months ago via Megan who has been teaching at McNally this year. Helps to have people on the inside 😉

I passed the news along to a few friends including Sharon who suggested we get former students to sign a card for George. As those of you with Facebook know, that project started a month ago or so. Megan arranged to have a small item added to yesterday’s staff meeting, and Sharon and I took the card to present to George along with Megan and Anna (another graduate from my year who is teaching at McNally). We managed to get at least one graduate from each year since 1997 sign the card, which I thought was pretty amazing. This was his 14th year as principal at McNally, and I know there are students from each year that are grateful he was their principal.

Walking into the staff meeting was kind of neat – there are a lot of teachers there that I remember, and they clearly remembered us. Nice to see people smile when you enter the room! Megan and I said a few words, and a few of the ladies shed some tears. George smiled and thanked us, shaking my hand and giving Sharon a hug. A few stories were shared, and then we let them finish the staff meeting. We walked around the school a bit too – it looks mostly the same except for the courtyard which is beautiful! You can see pictures here.

You might think it’s odd that I would be so interested in going back to see my high school principal, but I don’t. I spent a lot of time in the office during my three years at McNally, for both good and bad reasons! I was heavily involved in Students Union (finishing as Co-President with Sharon), I was the student rep on School Council, and I was McNally’s student rep for the Superintendent’s Advisory Committee. Bad reasons include conflicts with teachers, and things I’d rather not mention 😉 Needless to say, I saw a lot of Mr. Rice and developed a good relationship with him.

Generally speaking, I don’t think we realize or appreciate the effect someone has had upon us until it’s too late to thank them for it. I know George had a positive impact on me, always providing encouragement and leadership. I am glad I had the opportunity to thank him for it.

In case you’re wondering, George isn’t taking much time off! He’s planning to take a short vacation and then he’ll be making a bid to become a school board trustee. I wish him all the best!

Trying to grok carbon offsets

Post ImageThere’s been a lot of talk about carbon offsets in the news lately, and a whole crop of companies have sprung up to cater to the environmentally-conscious westerner. One such company, Zerofootprint, is Canadian was profiled today at TechCrunch:

Their chief goal, says the company, is to raise awareness among individuals and groups that everything we consume has some impact on the environment. The company is fighting global warming in two ways: encourage carbon reduction, and sell offsets for the remainder.

You can pretty much ignore the first goal. It sounds great, but there’s absolutely no way to measure whether or not they have encouraged reduction. Zerofootprint could fire off a few press releases a month that suggest they having a positive impact, but there’s no way to know. That makes them primarily a vendor of carbon offsets.

The anti-TechCrunch, uncov, also wrote about the company today:

These hosers have even set up their own market for these offsets, outside of the official exchanges. So okay, Zerofootprint is the one selling you these carbon offsets, and they’re also the ones validating that the offset in carbon actually takes place. This doesn’t sit right.

No, it doesn’t sit right.

In fact, the whole concept of carbon offsetting just doesn’t sit right with me. Environmentalist and writer George Monbiot explains the problems with carbon offsets very well in his article titled Selling Indulgences. He compares purchasing carbon offsets to the 15th and 16th century practice of selling absolutions:

Just as in the 15th and 16th centuries you could sleep with your sister and kill and lie without fear of eternal damnation, today you can live exactly as you please as long as you give your ducats to one of the companies selling indulgences. It is pernicious and destructive nonsense.

I have absolutely no doubt that humankind will figure out a way to survive global warming. I’m also fairly certain that carbon offsetting is not the solution. In fact, I think purchasing carbon offsets could actually make things worse because doing so enables us to ignore the root causes. We need to do more than just make ourselves feel better.

Read: Monbiot.com

Drobo: Infrant's ReadyNAS NV+ with better marketing

Post ImageHave you heard of Drobo? It’s a new storage device billed as “the world’s first storage robot.” I am not quite sure what that means, because there doesn’t seem to be anything robotic about it. Drobo has been receiving a ton of press lately, but I don’t know why. Take for instance, Michael Gartenberg’s post:

For the past few weeks, I’ve been using a new device that totally changed the way I think of external storage that finally does works the way I want and lets me leverage low cost and high capacity drives in their sweet spot. It’s called a Drobo and while some have called it a RAID array, it’s really much more than that.

What he likes about it is that everything is automatic. Drobo provides all of the advantages of a RAID array without having to do any configuration. Furthermore, you can replace drives with larger ones and your data is automatically migrated.

Thing is, there’s already a product that does all that. It’s called the ReadyNAS NV+ and it’s made by Infrant Technologies (recently aquired by Netgear). Their “automatic” RAID technology is called X-RAID, and it works like a charm. Actually, it does quite a bit more than the Drobo, and it’s only $150 more ($649 vs $499 USD). For instance, it allows you to specify a RAID-configuration if you want, and it also has a wicked management tool to configure monitoring, automatic backups, and more.

I guess the main difference between the two (besides the price) is that the Drobo is connected to your PC or Mac via USB, whereas the ReadyNAS is connected to your network via ethernet. But seriously, network storage is a much better choice. Most people have more than one computer, so all of them can access the ReadyNAS at once. Furthermore, if you turn off the computer that the Drobo is connected to, your data is no longer accessible. Not so with the ReadyNAS – your data is always accessible. Also, you’ll probably get better data rates over ethernet than over USB.

All of these points are mentioned in Engadget’s excellent review of the Drobo.

We’ve had both a ReadyNAS NV+ and an older ReadyNAS 600/X6 here at Paramagnus for over a year, and I have absolutely no complaints. I would highly recommend Infrant products if you’re looking for a storage solution.

I suppose the Drobo is positioned more as a consumer device, whereas the ReadyNAS NV+ has not been (at least not until being acquired by Netgear). I think Drobo probably has a wicked marketing team too, and props to them, they’ve managed to garner a lot of positive coverage.

That said, the ReadyNAS NV+ is a much better choice in my opinion. It’s too bad it hasn’t received the press coverage it deserves.

Read: Engadget

Guy Kawasaki and Truemors

Post ImageEver hear the name Guy Kawasaki before? If you’re at all involved in the tech or marketing industries, chances are you have. He’s a pretty famous guy, credited with “bringing the concept of evangelism to the high-tech business.” He made his name at Apple, where he was responsible for marketing of the Macintosh.

Lately Guy has been blogging, and launching a new company called Truemors. Here’s a description from the website:

The purpose of Truemors is to democratize information. We made it so that people don’t need to be a journalist or even run a web site or blog to “tell the world.” Think of Truemors as a friction-free news site.

Reaction to the site has run the gamut from extremely positive to extremely negative. That doesn’t seem to bug Guy though, who recently posted “By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09.” After listing a bunch of facts and figures, he says:

One thing is for sure: no entrepreneur can tell me that he needs $1 million, four programmers, and six months to launch this kind of company.

He then ends with:

I end with a truism (as opposed to truemor): There’s only one way to find out if your idea will succeed, and that’s to try it, so go for it.

Lots of people have written about his post already, but I just have to add my two cents.

He’s absolutely right with that last point – if you have an idea, you have to go for it! There’s no other way to determine if it will fail or succeed. And you’ll learn a lot in the process too, as Guy pointed out.

The idea that you can launch a company for $12,000 is bullshit though. Guy may only have spent around $12K on Truemors, but that doesn’t take into account the value his name brought to the whole project. He knows it too:

Many bloggers got bent out of shape: “The only reason Truemors is getting so much coverage is that it’s Guy’s site.” To which my response is, “You have a firm grasp of the obvious.”

It’s obvious, but it is worth mentioning. TechCrunch wrote about the site three times, and that was before it even launched! Even ignoring the rest of the press Truemors got, those three posts are invaluable, and Guy can thank his name for them.

Guy makes it sound like it’s now dead easy to build and launch a company for hardly any money. From my own experience, and from everyone I have had the opportunity to learn from over the last few years, that’s just not typical.

I’m not saying you need $1 million, and I don’t want to discount the fact that Guy earned the value his name carries over 24 years of hard work, but his experience is clearly unique. I find it hard to believe that most entrepreneurs will have a similar experience. I sure haven’t! I’d love to have over 260,000 page views at Podcast Spot in a single day.

Anyway, I’ll stop now. If you’d like to read an interesting counterpoint to Guy’s post, check out Valleywag.

(This is a total aside, but I think my friend Alex looks a lot like Guy. He’s an evangelist too!)

Read: Guy Kawasaki

Notes for 6/3/2007

Can you believe it’s June already? Here are my weekly notes:

  • For a computer geek, I sure have spent a lot of time outdoors this weekend! I walked about 32 blocks on Friday in the scorching heat with Sharon to check out Famoso (it was kinda like “Quizno’s for pizza”). Went to a BBQ/water fight yesterday. And today I spent a lot of time planting flowers.
  • On that note, I have new-found appreciation for gardening. Not only is it time consuming and laborious, it’s expensive! Who knew flowers could cost so much?
  • Last week I mentioned the giant wild pig, and wondered how it got so big. This week, the answer: it was raised on a farm and recently sold to a hunting preserve.
  • Don’t you hate it when you order something from a fast food restaurant only to discover that it looks nothing like what you saw in the commercial? Here’s a collection of images showing just that.
  • This news is a bit old, but apparently you can send an email to Canada Post and they’ll turn it into snail mail for you. The service is called EasyPost.
  • Facebook Polls launched recently, and initially it blocked “restricted text” like MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster from being used in the poll. Kinda funny…a rep for the company said it was due to “outdated code” – riiiight.

New RealPlayer – Who Cares?

Post ImageThere aren’t many technology companies that I try to stay away from completely, but there a few, and RealNetworks is one of them. I have never liked their software, and frankly, I’ve never quite understood their reason for existing. I mean besides Rob Glaser getting to do his own thing, what has RealNetworks accomplished? They created media formats that no one wanted to use, so they switched to reverse-engineering their competitor’s formats. Oh and they took Microsoft for $460 million for beating them with “monopolistic power”. Nevermind that Microsoft’s software/technology was and still is superior.

Anyway, after a relatively long period with no news, RealNetworks has announced a new version of RealPlayer:

How is the new RealPlayer different from previous versions? Let’s touch on a few highlights: The most notable difference is visible across tens of thousands of web sites immediately after installation. On-demand and live streaming and progressive video in the four major formats – Flash, Windows Media, QuickTime and Real – is now downloadable through a very simple download button that temporarily hovers near video content as it plays.

Ignoring the fact that there are already dozens of ways to download YouTube videos, why would I want to? The quality is usually pretty horrendous. I suppose downloading live streaming content is cool, but not when you consider that most live feeds are posted in downloadable form later anyway.

Seems to me like this is a last-ditch effort to make Real relevant. If you’re really interested for some reason, Scoble has a video interview and demo with Vice President Jeff Chasen.

I think Jason Cox said it best in a comment on Scoble’s post:

Real? How about no. Friends dont let friends use Real.

Agreed.

Read: RealPlayer Blog

iTunes Plus Launches

Post ImageSteve Jobs has finally made good on his promise to offer DRM-free music through iTunes. Apple is announcing today the availability of iTunes Plus:

Apple® today launched iTunes® Plus—DRM-free music tracks featuring high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings—for just $1.29 per song.

In addition, iTunes customers can now easily upgrade their library of previously purchased EMI content to iTunes Plus tracks for just 30 cents a song and $3.00 for most albums.

I think this is great news. The more retailers that offer DRM-free music the better! I am kind of confused by the pricing though.

Why are DRM-free tracks more expensive than DRM’d ones? They are higher quality encodings, sure, but so high than an extra 30 cents is warranted to cover the costs of storage and transfer? I don’t think so. Not when Amazon S3 sells bandwidth for 20 cents per GB.

I also find it kind of insulting that they named the store “iTunes Plus”. A more appropriate name would be “the iTunes you actually want” or something. Seriously.

Read: Apple

Microsoft Surface – Surface Computing Has Arrived

Post ImageMicrosoft Surface is insanely cool. I mean uber cool. Seriously, go watch the videos and tell me you’re not excited (Channel 10 has a longer video and Popular Mechanics also has a video). If there was ever a question about whether or not Microsoft can innovate, that question has been answered. Sure, similar ideas have existed for a long time, but not commercially available products. Microsoft Surface is new, different, and exciting. They’ve made it happen. From the press release:

Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, dynamic surface that provides effortless interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. Beginning at the end of this year, consumers will be able to interact with Surface in hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues.

It’s kind of like the user interface in Minority Report, except that Surface is not a hollywood trick. Surface is real!

Five years in the making, Surface is being targeted at businesses initially. According to CNET News.com, Microsoft expects that individuals will be able to get their own surface computers “within three to five years.” The devices currently have a price tag of around $10,000. Okay, that kind of sucks, but it’s to be expected for cutting edge technology I suppose.

Don’t be surprised if Surface is all you read about for the next few days – the blogosphere is sure to be buzzing. Heck, there’s already a bunch of articles and posts available and it was just announced! For instance, this “making of” article is an interesting read.

So yeah, Microsoft Surface looks awesome! I’m all excited now 🙂

Read: Microsoft