sorry state of affairs

So live.guadec.org has a live A/V stream...in realplayer. Ouch. Real is actually (still) a reasonable choice for live video streaming, but a vorbis stream and a continuously refreshing webcam page work about as well. Better if you feed it the viewgraphs at a reasonable size. But there's absolutely no excuse for archiving talks in realaudio. I shouldn't have to say it, but use Vorbis. So much for the benefits of open technology.

I guess this is really another clue that we're not doing a good enough job with the tools. Icecast2 remains perpetually unreleased, and while it's not hard to get working, it could certainly involve fewer steps and the documentation doesn't amount to much. And no one's ever written a brain-dead webcasting app.

theora alpha 2

In the actually doing something about it dept., we made the alpha 2 milestone release of the theora video codec last week. Yay! We've made all the bitstream-compatibility changes we intend for 1.0, so the main idea was to get people looking at it in case we need to make any more. :) Bug fixing and code clean up continue, but the main item for the beta release is a specification for the codec. If you'd like some code to read, please check out the source and pitch in with the writing.

London

Mostly settled in after the move now, and even starting to figure out where things are. It's certainly much more suburban than where we were in East London, which is nice...and a little scary that it's nice. Fortunately the tourist traffic to the gardens holds back the residencia in our little corner.

We're also right across the street from a nice (they're wonderfully snooty) cafe, so today I moved the airport up on top of the kitchen cabinets so it had line-of-sight out the window, and now I'm getting a nice strong signal amongst the umbrellas. It's too bad I don't drink coffee, it's a nice place to work.

The DSL install went quite well after all. There were some hassles getting the actual phone connected, but that only took a few hours, and the activation didn't require a visit at all. I plugged in the modem the day I got a schedule for the install and it just worked, three days before my ISP wrote back to confirm BT can connected me. :)

What was really strange was my ISP has no provision for moving customers--you have to cancel the service and reorder at the new location. This means all your account info changes, which isn't cool. Funny thing is this seems to apply internally as well: my modem worked on the new line with the old config including the old IP addresses! So if they'd just fix their database front end, it could have been really painless. I changed anyway, because I took the opportunity to switch to 'business class' in the nebulous hope it would help with the connection glitches I was getting.

Still, I'm pretty happy with the new place. We still wouldn't have moved if we'd had the choice, but the change is nice. We keep telling ourselves there's only two more moves to go. :)