.:: a few thoughts on the subject by rob wright ::.

Engadget has a great article on broadcatching or how to download and watch TV episodes. I’m not as anti-TiVo as Phil Torrone. I like the single purpose box that’s easy to use and requires zero maintenance. However, I really dislike that’s it’s hard to get TiVo-recorded programs on my laptop.

Having said all that, I used Azureus with the RSS Import plugin to download shows to ease the pain of my 9+ hours of Thanksgiving driving. It was excellent. Bittorrent + RSS is like fully distributed, multithreaded TiVo. I don’t have DirecTV, so I can only record one program at a time…big disadvantage. Using Azureus and www.btefnet.net/, I was able to download 10+ shows, 3 at a time. Albeit, the more popular shows download faster because there are more bittorrent seeds.

Anyway, read the article and try it…very cool.

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Making waves, Loosely Coupled reports that J2EE is no longer required. Nice thought, but I think that prediction is about 20 years off. Like most geeks, I like Linux also; but the fact is, I can write one J2EE application and be confident that it’ll run on OS X, Linux, Solaris, Windows, AIX, HP-UX, and z/OS. Granted, I’ll stay away from EJBs…what a pain. I know that he is a CEO and prone to controversial statements, but Jonathan Schwartz is right, Java = Open.

Having said all that, given the right opportunity, I’ll choose Python over Java. It’s hard to walk away from loosely-typed.

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I learned of 10 x 10 (tenbyten.org) while listening to Robert Scoble’s Overload talk from Bloggercon III on IT Conversations. From the website:

Each hour is presented as a picture postcard window, composed of 100 different frames, each of which holds the image of a single moment in time. Clicking on a single frame allows us to peer a bit deeper into the story that lies behind the image. In this way, we can dart in and out of the news, understanding both the individual stories and the ways in which they relate to each other.

What a great idea. I especially like the page for developers. It describes how one can programatically pull text and images from any day of record. A very RESTful API.

One drawback is they only draw from Reuters World News, BBC World Edition, and New York Times International News.

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Thank you Lou Holtz! Go Tigers!

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TiVo to add banner ads to service when fast forwarding | PVRblog

It would be interesting to know who was first to this idea, Mark Cuban or Tivo. Regardless, they can’t stop the 30 second skip!

From the Blog Maverick

1. When is the one time we all stare real hard at the TV and give 100pct of our attention? When we are fast forwarding using our TiVo/PVR units. TV never has a greater share of our attention because we all want to stop the fast forward right when the show starts back up. It would be real easy to write software to pull one of the 30 frames per second that are marked for the device, and hold that as a billboard ad for the product being sold until the commercial is over. The viewer won’t see it if they don’t fast forward, and if they do, they see the equivalent of a billboard for the product being sold. Viewers staring hard at your ad. That can’t be a bad thing.

If PVR providers want to get fancy, in a high-def world, they can pull identified frames and bits and reassemble a full ad at lower resolution…again, not difficult at all to do.

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Giant Waffle Float Rolling Through Columbus

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Thank you George F. Will.
Reelect Bush, Faults And All (washingtonpost.com)

The question is: Which candidate will most tenaciously and single-mindedly pursue victory? The answer is: Not John Kerry, who is multiple-minded about most matters.

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