To: iO! Staff
From: Paul Gorbould
Subject: gor[b]! gor[b]! gor[b]! gor[b]! gor[b]!
I have published something on my blog. Please go to my blog to see what I blogged.
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 04-15-2008 | 04:04 PM
Posted in: CBC | Teh Internets | Comments (6)
Since I’ve been working on it for more than a year, it seems appropriate that I should give just a wee plug to the shiny new CBC Digital Archives website.
Known among us archives types as simply “Phase II”, the new site has been completely redesigned from top to bottom - the first redesign in six years. Full details in the press release.
In some regards, the fact that the old site lasted six years is a testament to good design - hell, look at Google.com - a homepage designed by accident that has lasted for years.
Still, the old Archives site was getting creaky. In the YouTube era, people expect more video, and they expect it to be bigger than 240×180. And the new design fixed a few major limitations - bitty little graphics, the inability to properly house and showcase solo clips, no way to present classic CBC programs.
We’ve still got a few wrinkles to iron out (mostly pages that render too slowly, particularly in Internet Explorer) but overall I’m really pleased with the new design. I’d love to know what you think.
FYI, you can check out past iterations of the site at Archive.org’s Wayback Machine - an absolutely invaluable site, if you haven’t seen it.
On a similar note, I recently did some work with Joe Lawlor, CBC’s original webmaster, to archive the Archives site. I spend all day creating an archive of CBC Radio and CBC Television, but nobody archives CBC.ca.
So now we do. Using a $30 product called Offline Explorer, Joe and I regularly capture all of CBC.ca (well, most of it, not including media) to DVD. Not exactly high tech or professional, but I now have a catalogue of CBC.ca’s evolving site in a case on my desk.
I hope that one day the Archives site becomes trimedial - very few (if any?) corporations properly document their online development, and certainly not publicly.
As I found when I created the CBC.ca 10th anniversary site, even national broadcasters don’t keep copies of their online journalism.
Even today, websites tend to be seen as transient, disappearing into the past the moment they are published.
It reminds me of the early days of radio - broadcasts simply went out into the ether; why would anyone want to *keep* them? In fact, during the early years of the Second World War, CBC Radio recordings were etched on aluminum discs - which were melted down to make fighter planes as part of our contribution to the war effort.
But today, storage is (for all intents and purposes) free. We can, if we choose, keep all data, forever. The hard part is the planning.
Know any websites that catalogue their evolution? Please tell me about them - I’d love to check them out. And do poke around the new Archives site, and let me know what you think.
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 03-18-2008 | 11:03 AM
Posted in: CBC | Teh Internets | Comments (2)
Inspired by a message from my corporate technology department.
Next GroupWise purge: Saturday, October 20th, 2007
On October 20th, 2007, we will purge all GroupWise accounts of non-archived mail dating from prior to October 19th, 2007.
We realize that the inability to store messages for more than 24 hours may cause some minor inconvenience to employees. To minimize the impact of this new policy, please follow these steps:
- Delete all messages as soon as you have read them (the existing Read/Unread functionality is redundant, and will be deprecated.)
- If you think you may need particular details at a later date, please commit them to memory, or write them down in a three-ring binder. But please purge the pages from your binder at least once a week, as binder space is expensive. NOTE: Information Technology is investigating an upgrade to 3″ binders, but these may not work with all applications and are not supported.
- If you intend to be on vacation or sick for more than 24 hours, please set up an auto-delete rule on your GroupWise account. A simple automated reply message should be created, such as: “I’m sorry, I’m not around to receive your e-mail right now, and have deleted it. Please try again when you know I’m at my desk.”
- Employees are encouraged to subscribe to a free Gmail account, where storage space is somehow almost unlimited. According to their website, such accounts have “Over 2910.863667 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message”. We originally believed this counter was in fact counting down the diminishing amount of space, as ours does, but was not the case. We suspect witchcraft.
- Pay careful attention to the size of attachments, particularly audio, video, text or data files, which are often reasonably large. Do not send such files as e-mail attachments. Burn them to a CD or DVD, and put them in the internal mail. Or harness the power of the internet by placing them on a file-sharing system like BitTorrent so they can be accessed without undue strain on our capacity.
- Pay careful attention to the word count on messages you send. Where possible, use emoticons to convey context without using undue characters. Text message abbreviations and short grunts are often sufficient.
- To ensure efficient use of our finite resources, all libraries and archives will adopt a similar purge policy beginning immediately. If you subscribe to a periodical, a new issue will not be released until the previous one has put in the recycle bin and the bin has been emptied. Television programs are requested to reduce the number of shows they produce, as archive shelf space is limited.
The Access to Information law:
Each employee has the duty to safeguard in an appropriate manner business records that he/she creates or receives from an external source:
- Please delete all messages of a non-essential or essential nature. If possible, please avoid sending them in the first place. Work-related conversations must be plausibly deniable. If you must communicate with another employee, ensure nobody is watching.
- To understand how to distinguish business records from transitory records, please apply our new “year zero” filing criteria:
Did it happen prior to September 1, 2007? If the answer is “no”, the information is transitory. If you believe the answer is “yes”, you are simply incorrect.
Once again, thank you all for doing your part to reduce the load on the GroupWise system. This internet thing can’t keep growing forever.
Please delete this message.
Too slow. I’ll retract it. You didn’t see me….
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 10-10-2007 | 09:10 AM
Posted in: CBC | Teh Internets | Comments (3)
Today is “Taking Care of U” day at CBC - a “wellness fair” where employees can check out exhibits and take classes on stress reduction, health, nutrition, etc. I’ll probably drop by (but I’m eating a bowl of Smarties ice cream as I write this.)
Anyhow, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to update you on my ongoing battle with “internet elbow.”
I first brought this up almost a year ago in a piece called More worn-out elbows. I had discovered that many of my shirts had developed holes in the left elbow, and I attributed it to computer use, and leaning my non-mouse arm on the desk. There wasn’t anything on the internet about it, and in fact one of my commenters used that post to coin the term “internet elbow”. The word has since found some currency.
It seems plenty of people have this problem; solutions range from elbow patches to rolling up your sleeves to using a stack of napkins (suggested this week by Darren.)
But none of those solutions get to the root of the problems, which is bad posture/bad desk layout. In May I had a visit from the official CBC ergonomist, who analyzed my desk and agreed that the posture of leaning forward into the crook of an L-shaped workstation was probably at the root of the problem (as well as that crick in my neck.) I wrote up those results in an entry called Fixing the ‘Internet Elbow’.
Well, to their great credit, the folks at CBC took my issue seriously, and fixed it.
Here’s how it was laid out before - CRT monitor back in the corner, so I leaned forward on my non-adjustable chair:
I was able to acquire an LCD monitor, and a new chair with many more adjustment features (including the arms.) This let me face the computer on the flat part of the desk, and sit properly with my arms resting on the armrests, not the desk:
So far, so good! No new holes in my shirts (though it has been mostly T-shirt weather…) and more importantly, my neck and back feel much better. And I’m pleased to say that it looks like a more ergonomic layout is coming for my colleagues too - when we move into new offices this winter, the workstations will likely feature adjustable, curved corner keyboard trays and flat panel monitors.
So, on wellness day, I must tip my hat to my employer for taking my posture seriously. I know that not everyone out there will be able to convince their boss to shell out $500 for a chair and $300 for a screen. But considering I had the last chair for 10 years and the last screen for five, it isn’t a massive investment in the long run (it’s probably about .2 per cent of my salary over that period.)
That’s a bargain, really - one U.K. study suggested that more than 4 million working days were lost each year to work-related musculoskeletal disorders. In the U.S., one half of all working Americans report back pain symptoms each year - it’s the number one cause of missed work, and second only to respiratory infections in doctor visits.
And have you seen the cost of elbow patches these days? (Actually, has anyone even seen an elbow patch these days?) Maybe the napkins aren’t such a bad idea.
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 09-26-2007 | 12:09 AM
Posted in: Teh Internets | Comments (3)
I’ve been on a bit of a water theme here recently - watering cans, car washes, hat washes - so I thought I’d give you another one.
You may recall my (completely unjustified) pride to discover that my photo of a watering can fountain had been selected for a Flickr group devoted to, er, watering cans. Well, just a week later, my achievement was matched by my three-year-old daughter.
She’s really interested in the digital camera, so we’ve been showing her how to use it. There are megabytes full of blurry photos of the ground, but these are easily deleted, and she’s really getting quite proficient lately. I’ve uploaded some of her photos to my Flickr account, including this one she took of the fire hydrant up the street from our house:
Well, wouldn’t you know it? The next day, there’s an inquiry from the owner and operator of the Canadian Fire Hydrant Museum. Yes, there really is such a thing, and yes, my little girl’s picture caught its attention. Now, if there’s a Museum of Toy Dinosaurs Encrusted in Dried Play-Doh, she’s gonna make me rich.
She sure does take a lot of pictures of her toys, but it’s her pictures of people that are really interesting. See, people just look at kids differently than they look at adults. Can’t help it. So her pictures of people capture expressions that adult photographers never see. It’s subtle, and I can’t show you what I mean because I’m a bit of a tight-ass concerning privacy settings on family photos. But here are a few she’s taken of me.
See what I mean? Unless you are three, and my own issue, I doubt I’d look at you like that - or let you take a picture of me half asleep. Anyhow, here’s another smattering of their photos. I particularly like the fact that the Barbies are skinny dipping while the dinosaurs wear their clothes. Heck, it beats dried Play-Doh.
(Last minute update: Tonight, as she was washing them in the tub, my three-year-old told me the names of her Barbies: Leila, Janet, Princess, Skinny Legs and Good Hair.)
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 09-18-2007 | 11:09 PM
Posted in: Kids | Teh Internets | Comments (2)
I’ve created my share of digital images.
This blog hosts 337 images so far (and yeah, most are just lame efforts at photoshopping.) I’ve uploaded 1,122 photos to my Flickr account (and yeah, most are just snaps of my wee ones, restricted to friends and family.) Then there’s the miscellaneous ones done during 10 years of working for new media (and yeah, they’ve all wisely been deleted.) It’s a lot of pixels.
And now, I’m delighted to announce, one of my creations has finally garnered the worldwide praise I so richly think I deserve.
Yes, folks, somebody wants one of my public Flickr images for a group! And not just any group… it’s sought after by devotees of… watering cans!
Yes, the above picture - wedged between 2,00 family snaps taken at Franklin’s Garden on Toronto Island, after the CBC picnic - is now a part of the group “Gießkannen - watering cans” on Flickr. Description:
Diese Gruppe ist für Gießkannen.
This group is about watering cans and watering pots.
Of course all the discussion so far is in German, but I like to think of “watering pots” as a language we all speak.
There truly is a Flickr group for everything, no? And now that I’ve found my niche, I sort of want to become an expert. In my mind, I’m already composing shots of that rusty can in our front garden, the little plastic “smiling flower” cans my girls use when they are “helping”, the overpriced silver thing I bought my wife one Mother’s Day. And that’s without even leaving the house!
I may need to buy a new camera…
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 08-14-2007 | 12:08 AM
Posted in: Teh Internets | Comments (1)
I work for the CBC Digital Archives website (I think it’s OK to say that, right?)
Anyhow, we process a boatload of audio and video. English and French combined, there are more than 12,000 clips online already, with at least 400 more hours in the works in English alone. And since we’re redesigning the site to accomodate bigger, better quality video, we thought we’d better upgrade our storage capacity.
The solution, for the moment, is a black box like the one shown here. To be precise, it’s a LaCie 2.5 terabyte Biggest S2S RAID storage tower. To be impresice, it’s an external hard drive about the size of a shoe box. It weighs a ton, and holds an inconceivable amount of data.
A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes. So this shoe box holds 2,500 gigs - 10 times the amount of data my reasonably new home computer can store. We figure that’ll hold all the high-res videos we are encoding this year.
Which made me wonder how much consumer-level media a drive like this could handle.
So I saved a typical, decent quality YouTube file - in this case, Johnny Cash’s Hurt video (and yeah, I had a little cry first.) It runs about four minutes, and takes up a little over nine megabytes.
Math time:
So… if I were to film myself 24 hours a day in YouTube quality Flash video, I could store a two full years of my life - every second of it - on this one drive.
(I’d upload it, but it’d take you two full years to watch… you might want to fast forward to the good bits. Heck, I’d like to too.)
Yes, I’m playing fast and loose with numbers here - significant rounding of digits, and the drive can’t hold the full 2.5 TB, and Flash video sucks, but you get the point.
Now, how much audio would it hold?
Well, my 15 GB iPod is less than half full (5.6 GB) with 1,567 songs. According to iTunes, that’s enough music to play for 4.2 days without repeating.
If I were to somehow hook up the black box to my iPod, I could hold 446 times as many songs - almost 700,000 songs, enough to last 1,873 days. That’s five straight years of 24/7 music without hearing the same song twice.
Might want to bring the charger, though. Can I borrow some CDs?
One final thought:
Five years ago, the biggest available hard drive for a typical PC was 120 GB, and cost $750. (Our laCie costs around twice that, which would have got you 240 GB in 2002.) Today, that money gets you 10 times as much storage. So it’s reasonable to assume that five years from now, the same drive will hold more than 25 TB.
Meaning that for a couple of grand, you could record every second of your life - from birth to death - on video, and store it in one small black box.
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 08-08-2007 | 01:08 AM
Posted in: Teh Internets | Comments (10)
A couple of years ago, I prepared a topic for the CBC Digital Archives website about video surveillance. From photo radar to COPS to September 11, police and government agencies have been using video cameras to catch bad guys. Every now and then Canadians complain about privacy issues, and are usually told that if they aren’t doing anything wrong, they have nothing to worry about.
As it turns out, it’s the private sector they should be worried about.
A week ago, a CBC-TV newsroom colleague pulled me aside to show me something absolutely amazing: Google Maps is adding a “Street View” feature that gives you a pedestrian’s-eye-view of an entire city from street level. Check out this view of Howard Street in San Francisco to see it in action.
In essence, Google sends a van with roof-mounted cameras to snap a 360-degree view of all major streets, then stiches them together in a seamless addition to their already powerful Google Maps system. Once you plunk your virtual self on a street corner, you can pan around in a circle, “drive” forward or backward using navigation arrows, or zoom in close enough to see what brand of sneakers people are wearing.
It’s a breathtaking piece of technology, and I can see plenty of uses - in addition to giving directions to your next party, you can show people what the house looks like; real estate agents can virtually show not just a property but a whole neighbourhood. Tourist bureaus will have a field day with it.
Now, Google has only done select locations, and only the major streets - and they’ve only snapped each view once. But I think it’s only a matter of time before the street views are captured more often (imagine Google teaming up with Canada Post, or something) or they are captured 24/7 with video camera installations. Live web cams are nothing new, and the Ministry of Transportation already does this for traffic. Why not Google, in high res?
There are many parts of the world where video surveillance is a given. London has around half a million cameras, recording people up to 300 times a day; according to Wikipedia, the U.K. has 4 million closed-circuit cameras - one for every 14 people.
So, be prepared. You can probably start assuming that if you are out in public, you are on camera, and being broadcast around the world. Pick your nose accordingly.
Of course, it’s more than nose picking that people might be concerned about. I spent an hour “driving” around San Francisco, and captured these vacation snaps:
Assume people can read your license plates, and know where you are parked:
Assume they are watching your kids:
Assume they know if you are attending Big Gay Movie Night:
Assume they know where your money is being delivered, and by whom:
:
And assume they know if you are considering taking the plunge:
This is all a little alarmist, of course - mostly what I saw was people going about their everyday lives, and a lovely city that I’d like to spend more time in. People are already assembling their favourite “finds” from these images, including the Top 15 Google Street View sightings - they’ve found girls sunbathing, men visiting strip clubs, and a homeless man who was later killed defending his dog Boo Boo.
The geeks in the crowd (raises hand) are a little obsessed with finding out what sort of vehicles Google is using. Everyone assumes it’s a van, and Boing Boing posted an image of a vehicle with four Nikon DSLRs mounted on the roof. (Sounds plausible; earlier I wrote about Nikons being used for a very similar project.)
But I don’t think this is the right vehicle. San Francisco is a sunny, hilly place, and in many street view images I notice the vehicle’s shadow cast on the road ahead:
Looks like a van, all right, but the cameras obviously have some sort of enclosure. So I then cruised the maps, looking for a reflection of the van. Since you can pan around the full 360 degrees, surely you should be able to spot it reflected in something.
And eventually I found it. Here’s a shiny Mercedes dealership on Bryant St.:
And when you zoom in on the roof, you see the camera housing, just like in the shadow:
This seems to bear out another van spotting posted on Streetviewr.com, a site dedicated to interesting sightings from these maps.
Perhaps I should have pointed out earlier that there are several other street view sites in development. Windows Live Street View has an interesting “cockpit” approach, putting you behind the wheel of a car to “Walk, Drive, or Race” through the streets using your keyboard.
Historically, maps give you a perspective of geographical information about a place. In Windows Live™ Local, powered by Virtual Earth™, you’ve seen road, aerial, and hybrid maps. Then, we introduced bird’s eye views to give you a perspective from above. Now, we want you to be there, right in front of the pizza shop you are searching for, in the street-side views offered by Windows Live Local. Even though you haven’t left the comfort of your computer chair, you’ll feel like you’re actually there.
Their sample map is in Seattle (San Fran also available), and - no surprise - it seems to work properly only in Internet Explorer.
Less sexy, but closer to home is Virtual City, which has mapped out street level images of Toronto using high-def video cameras and a GPS device. It doesn’t stitch the images together in 3D, but it does have stills of both sides of all the main streets (click on the highlight feature to see if your street has been done). Here’s the Wellington Street entrance to the CBC building:
My sister was more than a little creeped out to find photos of the entrance to her house online here.
Finally, I wanted to mention another imaging site that isn’t strictly about street views, but all views.
Photosynth, another Microsoft product, “takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.”
In the sample demonstration, it uses publicly-available Flickr images of Venice’s Piazza San Marco and analyses them for shapes and perspectives. It then lets you navigate a 3D reconstruction of the location to see each picture, from the spot and angle it was taken.
Unlike the street view features, Photosynth is pretty heavy on the tech specs. It requires the installation of a browser ActiveX control, which takes a couple of minutes, and it doesn’t work on all graphics cards (including that of my reasonably new home computer, grrr.) If you can’t view it, at least check out the video of how it was made.
So, you can now visit CBC Toronto, stroll the streets of San Francisco or chase pigeons in St. Mark’s Square from the comfort of your office chair. But if you plan to do any of these things in person, look over your shoulder. Someone may be watching you from their office chair.
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 06-09-2007 | 02:06 PM
Posted in: Teh Internets | Comments (2)
CNN may claim to be “The Most Trusted Name In News”, but they aren’t above the occasional slip up, such as publishing their editing notes, or “borrowing” rather heavily from their competitors… or both.
Check out paragraph #8 in this story from today’s World Business section of CNN.com:
An editor’s note has been inserted in the text, and published in the story: “Well, at least she’s giving credit where credit is due… but she’s sourced the FT three times in this story… I think we need to remove one or two of them just to make it look like we didn’t just rewrite their article.”
Yikes.
My boss showed me this error an hour ago, and as of this writing it’s still online. (UPDATE: The offending graf was removed by 4 p.m. the next day - online for about 24 hours.)
News on the web may be fast paced, but it doesn’t have to be hasty. About a year and a half ago, CBC.ca introduced something we had wanted for years: a universal copy desk to check and edit stories before they are published online.
Getting funding for this was harder than you’d think. For the corporation’s first 60 years, we simply weren’t a print operation. With the exception of the odd TV caption or graphic, spelling didn’t count for much on TV, and it meant even less on radio - phonetics were more important than accuracy.
Then we started a website, and tried porting radio scripts directly to the web. Ugh. Never mind the uppercase typing, the bizarre punctuation, the spelled-out acronyms and phonetic last names… the grammar and spelling were atrocious. For more on these growing pains, see the excellent CBC.ca 10th anniversary item “CBC Learns to Spell” by Blair Shewchuk.
I was around for a few momentous typos and spellos (a term my friend uses for words that are misspelled not by accident, but because you really didn’t know the right spelling and didn’t check.) I got to witness e-mail pouring in about the giant 1997 CBC.ca headline “Death of Diana, Princess of Whales”. And I was able to save our Archives site from a reference to “no holes barred wrestling” (ouch.) But I’ve probably perpetrated a few doozies myself.
At least, I would have, if not for having a diligent editor and proofreader.
Most CBC news, arts and sports stories are now filed to a copy desk that is staffed (almost) around the clock. This team of editors is wonderful - they have to know their Gretzkys from their Gzowskis, and turn stories around in no time flat. (We don’t use them for the Archives site, but we have a freelance copyeditor who is diligent beyond reproach.) To keep up with breaking news, hot stories are sometimes published directly and edited on the fly, but for the most part a second set of eyeballs sees things before the public does. When we slip up, there’s a link on each news story for users to Report a Typo.
You might think that means we’ve finally got things figured out, but amazingly, copyediting is a hot topic once again. As CBC prepares to roll out the “myCBC” project in Vancouver, we’re faced with new (to CBC) concepts like citizen input, user-generated content and TV and radio reporters filing directly to the web. I certainly hope that all these things go through an editor, but it’s by no means certain.
Perhaps I’ll print out that CNN page and post it on a few strategic walls….
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 05-14-2007 | 05:05 PM
Posted in: CBC | Teh Internets | Comments (0)
I posted this on my Facebook account a while back, but since I don’t have time for much blogging of late, I’m “repurposing” it here to amuse the few stragglers not already on FB. It’s a ridiculous time-waster, but amusing nonetheless:
Go to Google and type your name followed by the words “likes to”. Make sure you put the whole thing in quotes.
(Note: this isn’t some magic Google trick - you just look at the results that come up, and copy/paste the relevant text.)
Here’s my top 10:
1. Paul likes to chug.
2. Paul likes to listen to Jimmy Buffet while he looks up sports news.
3. Paul likes to be well-informed on world events - he subscribes to three newspapers.
4. Paul likes to be recognized for his efforts and prefers a leading role.
5. Paul likes to keep Katie guessing, Katie likes to keep Paul on his toes.
6. Paul likes to hooked cos he’s prey to the female, calls a girl “babycakes”.
7. When in Jakarta, the capital, Paul likes to stay at the Menara Peninsula Hotel.
8. In his free time, Paul likes to give attention to his family and enjoys travelling.
9. When not doing pastoral duties, Paul likes to spend time with his family and, like Martin Luther, enjoy some home brew.
10. Paul likes to say that he was “in the right place at the right time” when he was given the opportunity to acquire 42 venture capital and leveraged buyout fund positions.
Plus a few bonus:
As a songwriter, Paul likes to paint pictures with his words.
Paul likes to play fetch…with a beer bottle cap.
“Paul likes to test himself,” she says. “That’s what makes Paul run.”
When not studying the lower eukaryotes, Paul likes to run with the Genesee Valley Harriers.
Paul likes to entertain and requests two banqueting tables in every place he stops.
Paul likes to sing just about anything - low notes, medium notes, and high notes - he has a four octave range!
Paul likes to be in control. Tight control. It’s why he is prone to what he calls “tensions”.
Paul likes to play basketball, but he’s really bad at it.
That last one is especially true. The most interesting results come from people with names frequently given to pets or children.
Here’s what my pal Tessa got:
Tessa likes to nip you in the butt, … And, when in close proximity Tessa likes to butt her head against yours.
Very loving, Tessa likes to cuddle and doesnt mind being held down for a short amount of time…
Or Fergus:
Fergus likes to play with a little yellow ball filled with catnip.
Fergus likes to eat flies.
Fergus likes to sleep in a tight little ball most nights.
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 05-14-2007 | 03:05 PM
Posted in: Teh Internets | Comments (0)
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