Train of Thought

Seasons greetings to everyone reading!

It’s time for another update on my sabbatical year. It’s time to declare it over.

At the start of the year, I posed two questions to myself:

• Do I want to integrate more cycling into my habits?
• Do I have the capacity to start my own software company?

The first, I can answer with a resounding no. As I wrote in the last update, I haven’t cycled any more than I did when I was working at Symbian. Whilst I’m a little disappointed with myself, I certainly hope to revisit this question some other time in the future. I certainly love cycling when I do it.

The second is a qualified yes. And qualified only until the company becomes a going concern, since I’m confident I’m on the right track. Transmission Begins was founded during the year, and after a flurry of activity while I wrote the first version of the My Own TV Channel product, things have been publicly quiet for the last few months.

Well, I was busy delivering Transmission Begins’ first income generating contract. (Perhaps I owe myself a couple of months sabbatical in the future!). Who I contracted with is a confidential matter (at their request), but to those of you who read this, thank you for a very enjoyable few months.

Now that is done, it is time to focus on Transmission Begins again. Today I’ve launched a blog on Transmission Begins website, and if you’re interested, I hope to see you there.

I’m a fan of typography, and this is a wonderful rendering of a great document – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I’m now about half way through my sabbatical year, so I thought a progress update would be in order. You may recall that I wanted to see if I could do two things:

• Integrate more cycling into my habits.
• Find out if I have the capacity to start my own software company.

Taking the cycling first, I haven’t much. Indeed, I cycle as infrequently as when I had a full time job. An early start has fizzled out, and my main activity has been to watch this year’s Tour de France. However, I got a nice new cycle computer for my birthday last week, so perhaps the trick of ‘new equipment’ will get me going (it has worked in the past).

On the software company front, I have made more progress, although I don’t claim to have a going concern yet! I have formed Transmission Begins, and developed its first product, My Own TV Channel. This is now just starting to be used by people other than me. It’s well received whenever I discuss it, so my current plan is to improve it somewhat and then focus on building a service business around it. The software itself is available for download with an open-source licence.

Apologies to those of you who don’t know a speaker of a little known language, ook. Clearly there is a sufferer in Grantham.

No pixels were photoshopped in the creation of this post.

Inspired by my encounter with the Miro team, and mindful of a need to broaden my skillset beyond client software, I’ve been busy the last few weeks. One comment that was made at the Miro presentation was that most of the channels are hosted over plain http, and make no use of the bittorrent client in Miro. In the pub discussion afterward, we seemed to conclude that bittorrent server software was still too hard to use.

Curious, I started looking around. Most of the bittorrent software I could find was limited in some awkward way – perhaps implemented in a less popular language, or designed to handle the needs of the high traffic pirate content servers rather than small providers of their own content. Two services stood out: Amazon’s S3 service lets you turn any hosted file into a torrent by adding the ‘.torrent’ extension to its URL, and the Miro Team’s Broadcast Machine did all the torrent generation server side, on your own server.

However, Broadcast Machine is no longer supported, and S3 leaves you needing to create an RSS feed. I’ve therefore been busy implementing a bittorrent server that can be hosted at any domain that supports PHP and MySQL. If you can install WordPress, I intend this software to work too. It can create a .torrent for any file already on your server, and then include it in an RSS based channel feed, ideal for clients like Miro.

I’m looking for a few beta testers to see if this software works outside of my own test set up. If you want to host some video content (perhaps you already post them to youtube) on your own domain, and you are familiar with installing software like WordPress there, you would be an ideal candidate. It would also be useful to see how multiple downloads work, so if you already use a torrent aware RSS reader (Miro is one), or would like to, please get in touch.

Feel free to email me (john@mcaleely.com), or post a response to this blog entry.

Incidentally, selling this software is not my business idea. This is BSD licensed open source.

I recently rummaged through my loft, and found my collection of Psion PDAs. I’ve got fond memories of these, and there is no way I would part with them. Or so I thought. On review, I had no less than seven of them, including many duplicates.

So, its off to eBay with some of them:

• A netBook
• A Revo
• A Series 5
• The PC Card adaptor for the Series 5

If you fancy buying one, you could always install some of my software!

You can tell I haven’t cycled a lot this spring. It’s taken quite a while to go from twice to three times. It took 1 hr 50 mins to complete the set yesterday.

As the second in an occasional series, Philippe sent me this pic he took. It’s a rather nice image of cyclists showing at the Catto Gallery recently. It looks like I’ve missed the chance to see it for real. Ah well, thanks Philippe!

Other internet video products have frustrating limitations which mean I don’t use them very much: Perhaps the files can only be watched for a few hours; I’m limited to watching programming that can sustain a large technology infrastructure or I have to put up with muddy, low quality, pictures. Often they are just incredibly complex combinations of technologies and applications.

Miro eliminates all these gripes, and I’ve been impressed by the experience of using Miro on my TV over the last six months or so. I’ve tried to write up some of the reasons from a professional perspective over the last few blog entries: Miro respects my own honesty; respects the authoring effort of the people who create video; allows people to publish at low cost and is easy to understand and use.

There’s another reason I like it though – it has become easy for me to download and watch some really high quality video on my TV I wouldn’t see elsewhere. Right now, Miro claims to have more HD content than similar competitors, and it looks great!

I’ve not seen a better way to watch video on the internet.