March 24th, 2010 is the second annual Ada Lovelace Day.

From findingada.com: Born December 10, 1815, Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software. Read more here, or on Wikipedia.

Get your red hot T-shirt or tote bag here.

I was made aware of Ada Lovelace Day by a post from Jono Bacon here.

 

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

This is an excellent example of Flash used to create a rich, deep interactive information graphic. The full animated, interactive version appears on the usatoday.net site here.

Even in Flash this could not have been easy. The project required significant artistic and programming skills. It would take a lot of work but I'd bet that this could be done in HTML5 with the <video> tag, javascript, and CSS. What is missing is a tool that would make the choreography of all those elements straightforward. I hope someone is working on creating an HTML5 workbench.

The link came to me via Gruber here.

 

 

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

The new book from 37 signals now has an attack ad.

From David Heinemeier Hansson's twitter (@dhh) "Word has come that Karl Rove has actually seen our REWORK attack ad and thought it was hysterical."

More on the book here.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

There is a fly in the ointment of HTML5 <video> adoption. There is still no agreement on a single encoding standard for video. Among the most popular browsers, Safari and Chrome currently support H.264 for <video> and Internet Explorer 9 will support H.264. Chrome also supports Ogg Vorbis and Firefox only supports Ogg Vorbis. What is a website to do? Most will ignore Ogg Vorbis and put up H.264 with a fallback to Flash to play on older browsers or Firefox using the same H.264 they encoded for HTML5 <video>.

Gruber has a well reasoned argument of why it would make sense for Firefox to adopt H.264 for HTML5 <video> here. His argument is based on the history of GIF and PNG and an interesting conjecture about the future of Ogg Vorbis.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

I expect we'll see a lot of these kind of applications. In this case, a company called Broadcast Pix is selling an application called iPixPanel to use the iPad as a control surface for their line of Slate video switchers. The press release is here.

Thanks to John Ittelson for pointing me to this one.

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AuthorMichael Slade

Chatroulette may be a fad and it may be more - only time will tell.

I've seen two videos that show some interesting aspects of communication revealed by Chatroulette. In the first one, pointed to by Gruber here, the documentary maker explains Chatroulette and discovers that partners mostly stick around for pretty women:

 In this one a musician is able to keep partners by entertaining them:

Both videos show that you can keep viewers by engaging them. It is remarkable that there is such a low barrier to this kind of research. Testing a cleaver idea takes no money, only an idea and time. It is also remarkable that so many people are sitting around waiting to be entertained.

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AuthorMichael Slade

Today Governor Schwarzenegger joined Steve Jobs and Senator Elaine Alquist (D-Santa Clara) at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford in Palo Alto to announce the introduction of SB 1395, legislation to make it more likely that Californians will affirm their preferred organ donor status. Steve Jobs talked about his liver transplant at about 13 minutes into the video.

I first saw this posted on Mashable here. It is also available on the Governor's site here with details of the bill.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

This may be the best Rube Goldberg Machine video ever. I was slow to post it. As of now it has over 8.6 million views. It appears to have been sponsored by StateFarm.

Click through the video and watch the 1080p version - it is beautiful in a junky kind of way.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

On June 29th, 2007 the first iPhone was shipped. It did pretty well on launch.

The App Store did not follow until July of 2008. The iPhone did even better.

The iPad does not ship for 2 weeks. Pre-orders seem high.

Apple is now accepting iPad Apps. The iPad should do better than pretty well.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

As reported by YouTube here, they are now receiving uploads of 24 hours of video every minute. So they are getting a day's worth of video. Every day they are getting 3.94 years of video. I don't think I'll have time to watch it all.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

As reported by Podcasting News here, Wikipedia is using .ogg Theora video rather than H.264. It looks like there is a Java applet player that works sometimes on Mac Safari 4 and is out of sync. It plays on Mac Firefox 3.6 and sometimes on Mac Chrome 5 and is out of sync. Of course these things are subject to change but that's how it is today. The battle for open vs. licensed continues. As Gruber points out here, ogg video will probably never play on a mobile device since there is no chip level decoder support for ogg as there is for H.264 and it will be a big battery drain since it will need to use the CPU. I agree him that most sites will use H.264 since with one encoding they can play in both the HTML 5 <video> tag (on most browsers) as well as Flash players for the browsers like Firefox that don't directly support H.264.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

The Boston Globe has a wonderful feature called The Big Picture with news stories in photographs. You can see the one below in higher resolution and a collection of others here.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

There is a pleasant surprise for most of us in an article here from ZDNet UK reports that Internet Explorer 9 will support HTML 5. In particular, it will support the <video> tag with decoding for MP3 and AAC for audio and H.264 and MPEG-4 for video.

To try the platform preview and see some cool HTML 5 example pages go to Microsoft's IE test site here.

For Adobe this may be a surprise but it is not pleasant.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

If you listen carefully you can hear the typing on thousands of keyboards as web folks get their sites ready for HTML 5 for the iPad.

You can also hear the typing on thousands more keyboards as programmers adapt their iPhone apps and are trying to code the first big app for iPad.

All of these people are able to evaluate their work on the iPad simulator that comes with the SDK.
Never in the history of computing platforms has there been a platform that launched with so many web sites tailored to it and so much software written for it before the first day of release. I have not heard people commenting about this maybe because it is just the environment we live in. This platform advantage is huge.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

In a press release here, the FCC today announced a plan for wired and wireless broadband. It can't come soon enough. 100Mbps to 100 million homes and 1Gbps to schools and hospitals. The plan also allocates additional bandwidth for already over stressed wireless networks. The executive summary is here.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

Here is an article in the New York Times about someone having problems connecting a Flip with a MacBook Pro. This appears to be an issue on some Flips sold in the past few months. Cisco (the folks who now own Flip) knows about the problem and is switching them out for new ones.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

Gruber comes through again with a great find. This link shows you a way to use the <video> tag in non-HTML5 browsers. It uses javascript to detect the browser and use either HTML5 <video> or a Flash player as appropriate. This is an approach I've been planning to use. It is nice to see others with similar ideas.

 

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

This article that was in Daring Fireball here makes an important point. I'll quote the some of the same text as Gruber:

"Unfortunately for the average person, the file system is so complex that everything outside of the desktop and the documents folder appears to be a vast labyrinth which most likely hides booby traps and minotaurs."

I find this true almost whenever I try to help someone find a video file to upload. I don't know the solution to this except maybe for there to be default locations for various kinds of files. Windows and the Mac try to do this in limited ways but it fails when you are trying to do something that varies in any way from the usual use case that the user knows.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

New York Times article about Windows Movie Maker is here. It also has a link for Adobe Premiere Elements 8.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade