Status-Q

I've now converted the second of my talks from the GOVIS 2007 conference. This one is about Exbiblio - a project to bring paper documents to life by giving them digital capabilities.

You can watch it directly here, if you should be so inclined, or there are links below to versions you can download and play in QuickTime or iTunes if wanted.

These are both H.264-based MP4 files. You can right-click and save them to disk.

IPOD version (71MB) (mirror) High quality MP4 version (162MB) (mirror) Windows Media version (100MB)

This work is the property of GOVIS and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Since Cisco's logo represents the Golden Gate Bridge, perhaps Tesco's represents the London Underground?

I had some great birthday cards last month. I think this was my favourite, though:

Many thanks to Kim and Robin

Hello... it's Disgusted of Tonbridge Wells here... I wish to complain about a distressing grammatical error which gets on my nerves, and which is becoming increasingly common even on the BBC.

I'm referring to the verb to hang, as in 'to hang by the neck until dead', and in particular to its past, and past participle, form, which is, of course, hanged.

Somebody on the Beeb this morning was talking about a chap who should be hung, drawn and quartered. He meant, of course, hanged.

Meat is hung. People are hanged.

Thank you for your attention.

About a month ago, I lost my Nokia E61 on the far side of the world. This wasn't as distressing as it might have been, because I knew I had my trusty old Blackberry 7100t waiting for me when I got home.

The 7100t is the best phone I've owned, in terms of reliability, quality of manufacture, and design of software. I've been thinking it would tide me over until an iPhone came along. But, in Europe, that's likely to mean waiting until at least the New Year, and 6 months is a long time in gadgetland.

The Blackberry is just as good as I remembered, but I've been spoiled now by some of the E61's features... Spoiled by having the TomTom software in my pocket. Spoiled by being able to use my phone as a 3G modem on T-Mobile's very reasonable data rates. Spoiled by the wifi connection and the quality of the loudspeaker which meant it was a great way to listen to podcasts. Some of these were a real pain to set up, but once working, they were really quite useful. It's not clear that even the iPhone will offer any of these. And now Nokia have their Media Transfer suite, which looks like good news for Mac owners with N-series phones. I could be tempted...

On the other hand, I'm not sure that I want to forsake Blackberry software for the rather buggy and disjointed interface that Symbian has, sadly, become. Come on, RIM - give us a 3G modem, at least!

I came across a new term for an organisation today. NJFP. It means 'Not Just For Profit'.

I like that.

A photo from my recent travels.

Last month I was invited to give a talk about our work at the GOVIS conference in New Zealand.

The video of the full talk is now available in various formats from the Ndiyo site, in case you're interested!

Ah, well, I might as well embed it here too... such is the magic of the web...

It's an exciting time at Cambridge Visual Networks because we're just starting to get orders from real customers.

CamVine, as we often abbreviate it, is a new company which we've set up to develop some of the ideas generated around Ndiyo. We've been working on it since the start of the year, but it's only been officially incorporated for about a month, so it's very encouraging to get sales, however modest, this early on...

Watch this space...!

Wow. This is pretty amazing (though it does require Firefox, unless you download a local app). Here's a partial screenshot:

It's a map of wifi routers in Cambridge - part of the worldwide WiGLE database created, it seems, by people driving around with stumbler software running. My home network - 20MarloweRd - can be seen here. If you're in the US, you can overlay the plots on nice maps. (I always try, by the way, to name my Wifi networks with something that will let people find out where they are. Then if I'm interfering with my neighbours, or if somebody needs connectivity in an emergency, they know whom to ask.) Many thanks to Michael Dales for the pointer...