Locality Switch

I did something different yesterday. After school, I walked to the local Next Byte store, and purchased Snow Leopard (the latest Apple operating system – released that very morning). Why is this different for me? I have never purchased an operating system on it’s first day of public availability. Never.

However, something inside me told me that I should go and get this upgrade as soon as possible. After all, I hadn’t upgraded to Leopard, and was still running Tiger. I also thought it would be worth upgrading to a 64 bit operating system.

The installation went well. The whole thing was finished before I could read a few articles in the latest Audio Technology (they have a good review on headphones, by the way). Very smooth, and much more streamline than any Windows installations I have ever performed (and I’ve done that a fair few times!).

The advantages I have received over using Tiger are numerous. I can see the small speed difference between the 64 bit apps and the old 32 bit apps. I love the new dock, the refined finder and better networking. Hey, even the Exchange supports makes me want to setup my own Exchange server!

Sure, many of the features I have benefited from would have been there by just upgrading to Leopard ages ago. However, I never actually used Leopard – while I didn’t see any problem with it, but it was still the OS which I never used. That’s just how it worked.

Do I regret being an early adopter of Snow Leopard? Not yet. And I don’t think I will. It’s been smooth sailing so far, and I expect it to stay that way. After all, Macs are renowned for being no-nonsense, and just getting the job done.

If you have an Intel Mac with Tiger, you should really be thinking about upgrading. In fact, don’t think about it; just do it. The upgrade is painless, and well worth it. If you get the box set, you even get iLife 09 and iWork 09 – it’s a wise investment.

The Community Broadcasting Foundation announced in their July 2009 Email Newsletter that they would soon be offering grants for IP based Outside Broadcast equipment. Well, it’s finally arrived. Here’s the details.

Any long term or temporary community station without any existing IP OB equipment may apply for the grant of up to $2,500. This opportunity is only open this year, so if you miss the 12th October 2009 deadline for submissions, then there is the chance you may never be able to apply for this type of grant.

Taking a look through the application form, you are asked how many OBs you did in 2009, and are asked to list the last five OBs you have performed. While it does say “if applicable” next to this bit, my guess is that stations with a previous history of OBs will be given priority.

The application form has a table with different categories of items, with a place to write in your quoted amount for each of the ones you are applying for. Categories include notebook computers, USB modems, Mixing consoles, Microphones, Audio interfaces and most curiously, Audio Streaming Software.

The Audio Streaming Software category is either badly worded, or implies that they don’t want to fund hardware solutions. It looks like AudioTX and Tieline are out of the question. I suppose this isn’t surprising, as the OB-over-IP Manual released by the CBF didn’t really cover any hardware solutions (or any open source software packages, either!).

What does this grant opportunity mean for the sector? It means that it may now be possible for many stations to move away from POTS codecs and leased lines which have been used for traditional outside broadcasts, and move towards IP equipment over 3G connections. It will allow for much more programming freedom, and will possibly allow for more OBs to occur.

Easier and cheaper OBs will hopefully allow for more community interaction and involvement, and that’s what we’re here for. Right?

Governments have a tendency to make things much harder than they have to be. Take, for example. social media. It’s a simple thing, isn’t it? Even a kid with elementary computer skills can understand how to post something to YouTube, a Blog, or Facebook. Why do our politicians get it so wrong?

Bureaucracy.

Let’s look at the short lived blog of Senator Conroy’s: The short lived Digital Economy blog. It looked and smelt like a government website, and got so many things wrong.

How about the Twitter account of my local Mayor, Councillor Larry Bolitho. The tweets are written in third person, each one starting with “Larry Bolitho”, and proceeding to tell us where he is. There aren’t any personal thoughts in there. Oh, and have you seen the instruction manual and disclaimer which comes with it?

Responses will be at the discretion of the Mayor… Who@HillsShireMayor chooses to follow on Twitter is at the discretion of the Mayor.

It would be great if our politicians could get with it on this whole social media thing. Some of their present attempts are just embarrassing.

However, there is someone who is up to date on this whole social media arena. Barack Obama. Have you seen the Whitehouse website? It’s beautiful, functional, accessable, and also integrates with social media platforms.

Anil Dash wrote a blog post about Government internet startups. He notes that they are now actually doing things right:

Now, .gov websites have historically been backwaters at best, a bunch of awkwardly-designed, poorly defined sites that only met the bare requirements of a web presence. But of course the current administration is comprised in great part of digital natives, and it’s remarkable how quickly they’ve remade the .gov world into not just a number of compelling websites, but into a broad set of platforms that are going to inspire as much technological innovation as Twitter, Facebook or the iPhone did when they unveiled their technology platforms.

It’s great to see what the Government of the United States of America is turning out, in terms of websites and useful web tools. They are being innovative, and are truly leading the way in government web presences. Countries around the world should use this as the benchmark, and strive to meet it.

Let’s hope the rest of the world can see the benefits of social media and the web, and start doing things properly. It can work to their advantage.

Twitter’s Trending Topics is where you can see the most popular topics on Twitter at the moment, and check out the stream of tweets related it it. It all works in real time, which opens it up to a whole heap of spam.

Twitter makes is really easy to get your message in front of a large audience through these trending topics, which spammers are utterly exploiting. To get your message in there, just include the trending key words in your tweet, and you magically appear in the stream for the topic.

It’s not only the spammy messages which are annoying – it’s also those foreign language messages which appear in the streams. I don’t need to see the tweets from those speaking another language – it doesn’t help me one bit.

How can this spam be stopped? Well, it would be fairly easy to remove the foreign language tweets from the stream – just have a set of common words for each language, and if the tweet matches another language’s key words, then Twitter can hide it from my stream.

The issue of real spam would be a bit trickier to fix, but I believe it is a very doable. The first thing to do would be for Twitter to scan each tweet and see if it has a whole heap of trending topic keywords in it. These are the most obvious type of trending topic spam.

Second thing to do would be placing a little link on each Tweet in the stream of Trending Topics which says “spam”. If people click that, it flags it for moderation. Oh, and to avoid abuse of the spam button, it should be only be available to users who have been on the site for a few months.

Finally, I believe that it should take a certain amount of time of someone being a user before they can actually appear in the trending topics stream. It won’t hurt if the new members don’t get in the stream, will it?

These are a few simple ideas which I humbly present to Twitter to help remove the low quality contributions by people who feel it is necessary to spam up my tweet-box.

During work experience, I was able to get very familiar with the Axia Audio-over-IP Studios. From my knowledge, there aren’t any that many stations using Axia studios, and I don’t even remember seeing them at SMPTE09, so their choice to invest in this brand was interesting to me.

However, there was a very valid reason they chose this brand over, say, Logiteck or Klotz. With either of these alternate brands (and others, I believe), the audio is all connect directly into the studio engines via I/O cards.

What happens if you have an audio source which needs to be used in multiple studios? You can access the audio over the network no matter what studio it is connected into, but if the studio with the audio for that feed connected into it needs to be brought offline, or perhaps restarted, you loose access to that source.

How do these companies suggest you get around this issue? Distribution amplifiers – run the audio into each studio’s engine through a DA. Hang on! Isn’t the point of Audio-over-IP equipment to avoid all of that thick multi-pair cable which is so expensive and takes extra time to install?

Let’s take a look at how Axia does it: no audio is actually connected into the studio engine. It all is connected into Audio Nodes, which are basically a 1RU device which hooks into your audio network via a single run of Cat6, and has some analog inputs and outputs on the back. All of that audio is now available on the network, to be accessed wherever you desire.

The end result: if you need to turn off a whole studio, you don’t risk taking any station-wide audio off the network. You also don’t need any multi pair cable into each studio, and DAs.

The problem I think the other manufacturers are facing is old thinking. (Actually, this is what the technical manager at Hope 103.2 described it as – and I agree with him). They are using the old methodology of all audio being connected into the studio, rather than having it connected into anywhere on the network. I can’t blame them for thinking like this – studios have been doing this for years, why change it for digital, right?

Why would you want to stick with this old approach when it’s obvious that this node approach of Axia’s is better thinking? By the way, it’s not as if Axia came up with this approach – computer networks have been doing this for ages.

Let’s move forwards and adapt new ways of thinking. Let’s be agents of change.

(I don’t mean to bag out Logiteck or Klotz. I spoke to both of them at SMPTE09, and they are great people. However, I believe that perhaps they are using the wrong techniques for this digital studio revolution.)

I’ve been playing around with MailChimp, which I am thinking may be used for a monthly member’s email at my local station. MailChimp, I have found, does a very nice job of allowing me to add images into a predefined template and write some content for it. However, what if I want to code my own emails?

Writing HTML to be displayed in email clients could be one of the riskiest things I ever do. Even more riskier than deploying a site written in Apache Tomcat (I never got along with that beast)!

Luckily, MailChimp has a nice little guide to help me out. It’s entitled How To Code HTML Emails, and contains advice such as this:

An HTML email is nothing but a web page. That’s it. I’m sorry if you thought there was more to it than that. So if you can code your own web page, you can code your own HTML email templates. There is a little catch, though. You have to code like it’s 1996 (I’ll explain later).

One little catch?

Do they even remember what the web was like in 1996? Incase you have forgotten what the web in ’96 looks like, there is a handy guide avaliable for you:

the technology was different in 1996. Although Internet Explorer 3.0 could run Java applets and inline media, Netscape Navigator could not, and in any case nobody felt comfortable doing anything more complicated than making a few animated GIFs. Additionally, very few web designers had even the most rudimentary of aesthetic sensibilities, and nearly half of them were clinically retarded. The internet in 1996 looks like it had been created in its entirety by a panel of 13-year-olds with Geocities accounts who had about half an hour to spare each night before bedtime.

From: https://www.msu.edu/~karjalae/internet96.htm

If you follow the link to that page, you will see some beautiful screen shots of the web in ’96. Wow!

Why would MailChimp tell us to code like that? It’s pathetic! Sadly, the safest way to code emails is to code like it’s 1996. Sadly.

Mail clients haven’t caught up with the rest of the world. Tables are the way to go, because email clients love to strip out half of your code, including CSS! I forgot the last time I wrote a page using a table for layout purposes – why are emails so backwards?!

There is the Email Standards Project which works “with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email”. Hey, they even publish a report on the status of each major client. Not surprisingly, Lotus Notes and Outlook 2007 are the worst, along with Gmail!

Their testing is based on their own Acid Test.

Let’s hope email clients can catch up with the rest of the world, and stop behaving like Internet Explorer 3.0!

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you would know that I have been at Hope 103.2 all week, on Work Experience. It’s been great. Truly, it’s probably been the best week I’ve had for several years.

I learnt heaps, especially about Axia Audio over IP systems, as well as Dalet 5.1, and all sorts of other tech goodies they have in master control. I was able to go around to each of the departments at the station, and see what their jobs entail, and help out a bit. I even got to do a cold call to try and sell sponsorship!

However, the best part wasn’t the tech. It wasn’t the marketing, sales, programming, promotions, events, creative, production, or on air teams. It was the atmosphere of the whole team at Hope 103.2, and the great vibe of everyone. I haven’t seen such a unified team in a long time (I believe the last time was LoveThat a few years back, but it was a smaller team).

I’ve met some great people at Hope 103.2, and I hope to keep in touch with them as time goes by. Perhaps I should even sign up as a volunteer? Would I have enough time in the day if I did that? Maybe. I suppose I should just be lead by God, and follow his guidance.

Anyway, thanks so much, Hope 103.2!!

In radio, highly accurate clocks are a must have. You can’t run without one. Even being out by a second or two can make timing out to the news a nightmare. Luckily, it’s really easy to synchronise your computer’s clock with highly accurate internet clocks.

It all works with NTP, or Network Time Protocool. It’s basically a protocool which allows you to synchronise one computer’s clock with another (hopefully accurate!) one. There’s heaps of clocks to synchronise with, and the NTP Pool Project is where you can find the network addresses for these clocks.

Signing up to the NTP Pool to get your clock synced with is pretty easy, and just requires some basic registry editing. Windowsnetworking.com explains the registry settings for NTP clients, and once you get one machine setup it’s just a matter of adding the registry changes to your logon script (or doing it manually, if you so desire!).

However, if you want more control over your synchronisation, you may setup an internal time server of your own which all of your network machines sync to. In the Windows world (read: Active Directory), it’s just a matter of telling your Windows Server to sync to the NTP pool at a fairly regular interval (once an hour?), and then tell your clients to sync to your own Windows Server at a regular interval – it can all be set with some logon scripts.

The trick to this method if selecting a Stratum One or Stratum Two NTP server on the web, from the public list of NTP Project servers. The reason for this is so you get a steady and reliable time source, rather than just selecting one at random from the NTP Pool.

If you’re a not for profit group in Australia (such as Community Radio), and can’t quite afford to buy the software you need, then this is for you! DonorTech is a organisation which provides software and hardware to not for profit groups for a tiny sum of money:

DonorTec provides donated software and hardware from companies such as Microsoft and Cisco to eligible Australian non profit groups with Income Tax Exempt Status (ITE). Via this program you can get the latest products each year e.g. Microsoft Windows Vista

If you’re strapped for cash, then this is just what you need. No more *cough* illegal software. No more borrowing that copy of XP from a friend. This is the real deal!

Their catalog of software is extensive: from Windows XP and Vista through to Windows Server 2008, Office 2007, Expression Web, etc. The list goes on. There is also a great list of hardware from Cisco, but at the time of writing, they don’t have any readily avaliable.

However, there are certain rules, particularly in regards to the Microsoft products. You can only order once a year, and but within a 24 month period, you can not order more than six software titles, and you can not order more than fifty licenses for each title.

There’s also a couple of other gotchas, but overall it is a very nice program. Did I mention how much they charge for their products? Windows XP costs $11 per licence, and Windows Server 2008 only costs $48. CALs also sell for around $3.

How can they do this? All of the software and hardware is donated by the suppliers.

The key to this is: planning. You need to plan not only how many licenses for each product you will need now, but also in the next 24 months. Develop a long-term strategic plan. But remember, plans are only guesses; I think it is best to over-order slightly, to cover all bases.

Finally, you need to ensure you have an ATO recognised Income Tax Exemption (ITE). Luckily, our government makes it very easy to check out your accreditation status through the web.

Rode make great microphones, which suit broadcasters, studios, and live performers. They are built really solidly, and have a generous warranty to back it. As a bonus, they’re an 100% Aussie company!

They are currently running a promotion where you buy a qualifying product of theirs, and they will give you a M1, M2 or M3 for only $1 – upon redemption. Here’s the blurb:

What can you buy for a dollar? Not much these days. A cup of coffee? Unlikely. Your choice of the rock-solid RØDE M1 live dynamic microphone, the RØDE M2, a live vocal condenser microphone or the RØDE M3, a versatile 1/2″ condenser microphone? You wouldn’t have thought so, but this August RØDE is giving you the opportunity to pick up any one of these critically acclaimed mics for just one Australian dollar when you purchase another qualifying RØDE mic from a participating dealer!

I’m thinking of grabbing a Procaster for about $200, and using that to redeem an M2. That would be awesome :)

On the page of the Procaster, there is a great little video of Ken Sparkes talking about the mic, but also mic techniques. This is the sort of stuff that we should be teaching to all presenters we train in community radio. It’s such a fundamental, but quite often we take it for granted.

There we have it. The Rode Procaster and some great microphone techniques for radio in the one video.