The introduction of intermediate transcoding of the Web by proxies within the telco infrastructure has seen some unpleasant controversy in recent times. The problem is best understood with an example:
Pretend for a moment that I am the proud owner of a vintage car, and it is insured with one of the few companies willing to take on the risk. Damage to the windscreen, for example, would require a custom-built replacement by a specialist repair team. Now imagine that one day I try to contact my insurance company to inform them I’m about to embark on a vintage rally and will need temporary additional cover, only to find that I’m now dealing with an insurance broker. They don’t know anything [click title to read more…]
This is going to be interesting. I’m supposed to be chairing meetings in Korea this week, but my skating accident at Christmas has curtailed my travel, so this week I will be chairing the meetings from a distance of 9000 kilometres, and a 9 hours time difference. Over the weekend I have shifted my personal time zone to Korean time, and now I am having my breakfast at midnight. The meetings in Korea are about to start. I’m using IRC, and from tomorrow I will also have audio communication via VoIP. A video connection is possible, but I will wait to see how the audio link works out first.
Update: Audio from Korea was quite clear. A few warbles and [click title to read more…]
I have to say that it was an honour to be the co-host of the W3C’s UWA workshop in Dublin this year. This is the second time I’ve had this role, the last time being in 2004 when the W3C’s DI group held a workshop on content metadata. This year, 30 people attended from around the globe and it was a very enlightening two days. I won’t say much more at this time about what was presented and discussed because there will be a formal publication in due course, and I don’t want to upstage the Chair, Dave Raggett.
Check out the UWA Workshop home page. I’ll provide a personal update later.
My travel experiences are legendary in the office. I travel a lot, so you’d expect me to have a few incidents along the way, but I seem to have something go wrong on every trip. Like the time the window in my hotel room had a wall built a few centimetres outside it while the lights in my room didn’t work, or the time I was detained in the US because their computers said I was already in the US when I had arrived, or the time I spent three hours on the runway in Chicago in a storm, or the time the airport cops raided the terminal transfer bus to stem an “altercation”, or the time I arrived in [click title to read more…]
After months of procedural red tape, the W3C has announced that the Device Description Working Group has been rechartered to work on the design of the APIs for the DD Repository. I am the Chair of the Group, so I’m really happy that the work is moving into the next phase. Perhaps this will go some way to achieving Dan Appelquist’s DD Nirvana that he recently described. (A better job of describing the DD goal I could not have written myself. Thanks Dan!)
The process of getting this off the ground was quite intense. First, the existing group (let’s call it DD mark I) had to have its charter time extended a few [click title to read more…]