Conference

–> IT Conference

——-> Web 2.0 Conference (people use MacBook’s and blog during sessions)

——-> Enterprisey Conference (people fall asleep in sessions and check their Windows laptop and/or Blackberry during breaks)

Yesterday I was at an Enterprisey Conference. As the taxonomy develops I think I’ll release it under a creative commons license for the public good.

Ok so I admit I was vehemently opposed to the very idea of a Blackberry, six months ago. Then I got one and started to see the plus-side of the device. These days I positively rave about the damn thing.

Although I’m not the type to constantly check for messages, which is I think the definition of a crackberry user and their addiction. I must say the whole experience is pretty slick.

This week I spent two days at a conference in London and decided to leave my MacBook Pro at home. Instead opting to use my laptop bag as a shirt-carrying utensil. The Blackberry was my connection to the internet (something I can’t live without any longer). I used instant messaging to talk to people. Used Google maps and its satellite view to figure out which end of Victoria station I was standing at and how to get to the event. Read emails, made appointments, and spoke to a few folk as well.

The only thing I’d like is maybe a blog writing client because I seem to get a lot of fresh new ideas at events like the one I was at.

Alongside the CS300, Polar provide a personal trainer website, which allows you to setup a training programme after providing it with some vital stats (age, weight, height, fitness, goals, etc.). The whole site is very easy to use and follows the design ethic of CS300, i.e. being very slick.

Polar provides a WebLink SW software utility that transfers the statistics collected during excercise (heartrate, duration, etc) and uploads these to the personal trainer website, so that you can track your planned training against your actual over time. Very slick, once again.

Now… the coolest feature of the whole setup is the manner in which the CS300 talks to the personal trainer website.  If  Sony were to produce the CS300, it would supply a proprietary USB cable,  that is easily lost and costs £50 to replace.  Polar have come up with an old school way of achieving the same thing…. sound modulation.

Yip, the CS300 talks to the WebLink SW using your PC microphone. You launch the WebLink utility and hit the listen button. On the Cs300 watch you select Connect and it starts sputtering squelchy sounds.

One minute later and the personal trainer website contains all your latest training details. Slick, slick, slick.

If you’re into cycling and training, I can’ t recommend the CS300 widely enough. Its a joy to use. The only thing missing from it is a Mac OS X version of the WebLink SW software.

Well, the same lack of channels seems to be a problem in the UK. So it seems there’s a problem with the device itself.

My eyeTV setup combines both aerials as one aerial thereby increasing the quality and strength of the signal received. After an exhaustive channel search the setup wizard managed to find a handful of BBC channels, which mimmicked the Dutch case. There was no ITV, no Channel4, nor any of the other digital channels available on FreeView.

So today as an experiment I hooked up the eyeTV to my rooftop aerial. This is £120 of the finest coaxial-based entertainment reception technology on the market.

I ran the eyeTV setup wizard and it found a truckload of channels, including all those from channel4, ITV, and UKTV. Basically the whole FreeView catalogue.

I then hooked up my eyeTV aerials and found out the channels found had disappeared.

So what does this mean ? It means although the eyeTV interface is slick and the tie-in to tvtv is great, the aerials supplied with the unit are rubbish.

This is a great sign that the blogosphere is a predominantly human device. Techmeme which scans the blogosphere has ground to a halt with regards to fresh content, meaning people are enjoying christmas, visiting family, and playing with their new toys.

The pain in the ass was moving the content. Although there’s several ways of importing content into WordPress there’s bugger-all means to get the content out of Typo. I tried the RSS route but that failed. You need to use WXR, which is WordPress’ namespace-extended RSS and generating a feed in that vernacular was too much of a pain. In the end, I ended up cutting-and-pasting the content, which is slightly ironic/embarrasing for someone in charge of technology at a company that develops and sells content migration software.

Vamosa’s software is the “Rolls Royce” of content migration software. It’d be nice if we can get it to shift 50 pages as easily as it is to shift 50,000 pages of content.

I looked at several engines (WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, and TypePad) and you can tell by the URL which blogging engine won. WordPress seemed to provide the best bang for zero-bucks. WordPress has lots of usable features out of the box: domain hosting, quick authoring, pages, RSS everthing, and nice looking templates.

Now I need to move my old blogging content over from its customised Typo backend and ijonas.com (which is down for an unknown reason). I also need to redirect my ijonas.com email to GMail.

I guess the moral of the story is that you can get a hell of a lot for free and you needn’t look far either.

So I was surprised to see the game publisher recommending that I remove their copy protection by applying a patch supplied by them.

Hello,

If you have the DVDROM version of COJ: Please download the Call of Juarez DVD patch (11.5MB) by clicking the link http://patch.focus-home.com/COJ1.0DVD_Patch.zip
You can now run Call of Juarez without the game DVD on your drive. This is an unofficial patch only for those which have a SecuROM problem (not all CoJ players).

Best Regards,
Technical Support
Focus Home Interactive

I think I’ve seen it all.