MicroMemo voice recorder for iPod is here!

Finally the MicroMemo has arrived :-) and it's pretty groovy:

• It records well using a dodgy old lapel microphone as well as the supplied mic-on-a-stick in quite high-fidelity.
• The "Voice Memos" appear in iTunes as stereo WAV PCM files at 22kHz or 44kHz and can be copied by iTunes into the iTunes music folder under unknown Album & Artist. They're unsuitable for my purposes (informal podcasting for lectures) but I can easily use Audacity and LAME to downsize them to MP3 (e.g. the file linked from the title of this post was created with lame.exe -m m -h --resample 22 -v.)
• The built-in speaker works, although it's quite quiet.
• The supplied mic-on-a-stick effectively turns the iPod+µMemo into a recorder that would be stable and reasonably unobtrusive on a desk.

Downsides

Can't think of much except:

• Please can we have a level meter when recording? Presumably that's a software update -- XtremeMac or Apple please!
• 16bit 22kHz mono is a bit too good for my purposes: 1.25Mb for 30s? What about an hour's lecture? 150Mb! It would be nice to have a range of quality settings and support for more than PCM WAV format (ADPCM at least would be nice.)
• Related niggle: The manual says it'll record in stereo from a stereo source. This seems to only happen in "high quality" mode (44kHz 16bit stereo PCM, even more space-hungry!) Why is stereo not an option?

So overall: Good. Does pretty-much what it says on the tin. Could be improved and I hope that in future the iPod software will be ... optimist? I waited 6 months for the µMemo ...

Update 25Aug06:

Unfortunately there is not a way to display a level meter. The reason there are only two recording formats is because this is the most that the iPod itself can support.

Customer Service Representative
XtremeMac

Boo...

Malboro.com: Inaccessible cigarettes

(Via The Daily WTF:) malboro.com has a bizarre way of selecting who to advertise cigarettes to! Their home page contains the following HTML and JavaScript (below). The headline WTF is that it doesn't work in any browser other than Internet Explorer since the JavaScript redirection relies on using MS's click() method (rather than the rest-of-the-world's onclick) ... but it's also completely inaccessible without JavaScript because it not only relies on IE-specific code to do the redirection but also encodes the redirection URL in the script ... so the link isn't even clickable! Non-IE users are presented with a blank page. The really crazy thing is the <meta> tag, which suggests that the redirecting home page was generated automatically by server-side code using Microsoft .Net! The days when pages were deliberately written to abuse specific browsers (e.g. Opera and the MSN-bork) are not gone they're just refining the technique so that it's exceptional ;-)

<html>
<head>
<meta name="GENERATOR" Content="Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.1">
<title>Coupons and special offers from Marlboro</title>

 <meta name="keywords" content="marlboro cigarettes, marlboro miles" />
 <meta name="description" content="" />
</head>
<script language=javascript>
<!--
function redirect()
{
 var anchorObj = document.getElementById("target1");
 anchorObj.href = "http://smokersignup.com/signup/index.jsp?pc=MAR2006";
 anchorObj.click();
}
//-->
</script>

<body onload="javascript:redirect();">
 <a id="target1" href="#"></a>


</body>
</html>

Perhaps it's deliberate? Only IE-users need cigarette advertising. Are non-IE users considered too intelligent to be fooled by it, or maybe they're all assumed to smoke Marlboro® anyway?!

V for Vendetta

Jeremy Keith has posted an excellent review of the Wachowski Brothers' film V for Vendetta, proving that as well as being a great JavaScript proponent (and an excellent speaker!) he's also thoughtful and literate … of course it helps that I agree wholesale with what he says ;-) but could not match his expressiveness! One thing to add: For me the central character of "V" was defined by his voice and as such it was an excellent performance by Hugo Weaving -- fantastic! (Unlike Jeremy I did see it in the cinema, where it was spectacular, and the audio at my local Odeon brought this to the fore. Some great friends just bought me the DVD for my birthday: many thanks, Jon+Katie!!)

Blackboard patent furore

What a surprise! (Not...) Blackboard merges-with/takes-over WebCT and lo! the company with the monopoly starts legal proceedings against its rivals ... It's a sickening situation: We rely on Blackboard's software to support teaching so we're "safe" as we're using software supplied by the monopolist but I can't help but worry that Blackboard's eponymous LMS, which is a definite "Web 1.0" application, will continue to develop ever-so slowly while the company stifles competition until there are no competitors (commercial or open source), whereupon Blackboard's development will stop :-(

At least there's an apparent groundswell of support for the defendants & room for some black humour that I quite enjoyed...

Update@11AM Apparently, according to an article in the Chronicle of HE referenced in wikipedia, Blackboard won't go after open source LMS's...

Microformats: So subtle, so light, so try some!

Ted Drake (from Yahoo! is that a cool, innovating company or what?) hits the nail on the head:  Microformats are so easy the only excuse for not using them is not knowing how to!

I've used PHP-driven vCards before but that's heavy ... in contrast, hCard is sooo easy, light on the mark-up and with something like Tails it becomes easily discoverable and usable! And if Steve Martin can use it it must be cool ;-)

Incidentally, Steve's provides an answer to a topic raised at @media2006: What about privacy? Simply ensure that only the information that you want to share with "the world" is in the hCard ... most is optional. Update 14Aug: And in response to something I heard about identity theft, mine no-longer contains my birth date 'cos (apparently) all someone needs is your full name, address and date of birth to do some mischief!

MicroMemo voice recorder for iPod

Argh!!! XtremeMac iPod Audio Accessories: MicroMemo for iPod with video how long must I wait??

It's been mentioned on Gizmodo twice now and the manufacturer's site currently says shipping this summer :'-( When I first got excited about it in January it was due in spring, then in June it was early July now it's f******g summer <groan> I've even pre-ordered one, I'm that keen...

Update: Hurrah! Mine arrived today, August 24^th & I'll make a more detailed post later...

@media 2006 feedback

Now that I've had time to take a breather, recover from my recent hectic schedule and the mad-rush of the "results period" has almost gone at work I've come up with some specific comments about @media, other than it being excellent ;-):

• Jeffrey Veen used a neat example of the presentation of information as part of his talk (e.g. see this photo by Jan Brasna on Flickr) where he progressed from an unsemantic table of meteorological data to an application allowing users to explore the data. As a meteorologist <grin> I refrained from commenting at the time that the final step, where the rainfall data values were replaced by graphics, was a bad idea (from my pov) ... but it depends on who your users are/what the data/application is for: I preferred seeing the values in the web app.; others might prefer the raindrop symbols, depending on the purpose. I guess what I'm trying to say is don't sacrifice accuracy at the expense of simplicity -- e.g. make it the user's choice whether they see the graphics or data...
• In the final panel session it was suggested that few, if any, educational institutions were sufficiently fast at adapting courses to reflect the latest trends in web development. Whilst I agree with that in general (typical approval processes mean it takes more than a year to get a new course up and running in the UK -- e.g. a colleague here is just starting to look at "Web 2.0" for a master's level course and it might be approved to start in September 2007!), modules on established courses can adapt quickly and so:
  1. my 2^nd year JavaScript module is up-to-date in that it teaches how to write scripts using DOM methods;
  2. my 3^rd year "advanced web design" module this year covered things like accessibility, unobtrusive JavaScript, CSS-based layout and content negotiation;
  3. new this year we started a 3^rd year module on XML, including XSLT, XMLDOM.
  Admittedly this is because there are a few standards enthusiasts in my Faculty, but that'd be the same everywhere ... So at least one institution in the UK offers a half-field in Computing that uses web standards in a majority of modules :-D [There are more of us out there! Check out this SimpleBits post...]

XHR progress towards standardisation?

Thanks to Jeremy Keith on domscripting.org for pointing this out: The W3C has published a draft for a specification standardising the XMLHTTPRequest object (upon which Ajax, Hijax, Lojax etc are based [in fact I thought I was making the latter up, but not so!])

Prompted by talking to Andy at @media, after a quick skim-read I can't see that they're standardising the this keyword inside event handlers :-( According to Flanagan (page 365), DOM2 doesn't so I guess we're stuck...

Bloody weather!

OK, I know us Brit's have a reputation for being weather-bores but I am a meteorologist ;-) so feel I should have some leeway: Bloody weather! It's too hot, I must work, we have lots of critical meetings at this time of year, virtually no air-conditioning, so it's been bad enough being too hot. Today, after the excellent thunderstorms (fab just being able to stand in the rain getting wet...) my damn optical mouse is sticking to the desk! Everything seems to be conspiring to make it difficult to work :-(

Meme: Web development skill levels ;-)

Kinda pointless but what's your level? My self-assessment is:

Levels of HTML knowledge

HTML Level 5

Levels of CSS knowledge

CSS Level 5

Levels of JavaScript knowledge

JavaScript Level 4½: Woohoo! with Jeremy Keith! :-D

JavaScript Level 4½ -- my definition:

var button = document.getElementById("hello");
button.onclick=function(event) {
    hello(WORLD);
}