Remember, you saw it here first.

We still need to find out in which form she (if it was her) killed the later doctor but I’m feeling very pleased with myself today!

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2011/may11/05-10CorpNewsPR.mspx

I thought I’d share my initial gut thoughts on this.

1. There’s an existing revenue stream within Skype – I pay for one of the subscription services for free UK calls and there’s an option for free worldwide too at £7.99 pm – this has got to be better than Messenger or Communicator has ever produced!
2. This smells like the creeping death of MSN… We’ve seen the the live services starting to being aggregated into O365 and there was never any money in there.
3. There are now another set of MS partners who will be ticked off, the Telcos. It seems that the previous fear of anything PSTN related has now evaporated in Redmond. Stand by for the anti-compete suits.
4. I tweeted this news and one of the immediate responses I got from a colleague on the games site I write for was “That could be pretty awesome if they manage to fully integrate it with things like XBL friends lists and parties.” so there’s immediate market.
5. The client is available EVERYWHERE. And it works consistently, effectively and simply. There’s lessons to be learned there.

Interesting times.

Here’s what we know:

1. River is in jail for killing someone “very important”
2. River is a time traveller, she uses technology to assist but so does The Doctor
3. River has a very well developed grasp of time-spaces, probably more than we’ve seen any other character bar known Time Lords

Here’re my theory based on what we’ve seen so far in this season.

The “very important” person River killed is indeed The Doctor, this event happened by the side of a lake as River was in the space-suit.

Amy Pond is pregnant and the child WILL be affected by exposure to time fluxes from the Tardis. We saw part of this in evidence as the child is pictured with Amy and then is seen to ‘die’ and regenerate in the back alley. My theory is that this child is, or becomes, River Song. There is the quirk that River dies in the Library but we know that she’s actually downloaded into the core so maybe that negates the regeneration process, or perhaps River’s current form is actually her final regeneration.

There are holes of course – why has the doctor not come across this time traveller in any of her previous incarnations – but it’s a big universe! Then there is the issue of ‘The Doctors Daughter” – the genetic clone of the Doctor who’s set out on her own adventures. Again it’s a big universe.

I guess time (no pun intended) will tell, but the River Song / Doctor / Amy story arc is getting more and more interesting!

Anyway, time moved on and I had some little success building various cables and experimenting but my solution came in the form of a relatively simple little device designed to do something totally different (isn’t that always the way), namely to provide an interface to connect an electric guitar to the iPhone (or iPod Touch or iPad). The manufacturer is Peavey – those of you in the know will already have the association made as Peavey are well know for their guitar amplifiers among other things – and the device is the Ampkit Link.

This innocuous little white widget does exactly what I want it to do and I’m now a very happy, and very audio integrated, person. The XBox side of the equation is going to be handled by a simple adaptor cable which I’ll build up as the connections are different on the iPone jack – and therefore on the Peavey device – than on the XBox controller.

As an aside, the app which supports the Link hardware is free for a basic version and, if you’re a guitar person with an i-Device, might be worth a look-see.

The Ampkit Link

The event was an article in a news feed I get from SearchStorage. The article itself is an interesting piece on how NetApp are updating their mid-high end FAS arrays (OK it’s only interesting if you’re into storage subsystems!) but the key phrases which stood out were these:

Here we have NetApp, a key performer at Microsoft’s Hosting Summit this year with all of the talk about “Cloud services” lining up a competitor to vBlock using VMware – one of the foundations stones of vBlock!  The question I asked myself is this… Where the hell is Hyper-V?!

Over and over, I’m seeing cloud architectures and solution using VMware, the partners which Microsoft themselves have been sharing media time with have VMware solutions as their center-fold products in this space.And even where there IS a Microsoft program for the hardware vendors to tie in to, it’s a very interesting bit of reading when you do follow the vendor links placed there. Of all of the big names, I found 1 (one!) who had dedicated information for me to access related to the architectures the program refers too. All of the others followed the standard approach of ‘As part of the delivery of this program we’ll be using these great products which we sell <link><link><link>. There were no pre-validated configurations available which I could measure my requirements against!

I’m going to link HERE to the only decent landing page there was, it’s DELL. They had a single page, with some interesting and usable reference documentation at the bottom. Documentation which seemed to have bee written specifically for this program.

So here’s my issue, I like Hyper-V, I like the Systems Centre elements supporting it (VMM Self Service Portal v2 is sweet!) I’ve deployed or been part of project deploying, quite a number of environment delivering large-scale services running on Hyper-V, BUT  VMware seems part of all of the ‘solutions’ which are coming forward. Am I backing the wrong horse??

Then I read this in RCPmag which, not for the first time, questioned what Microsoft actual strategy is in terms of ‘The Cloud” (I really do hope we can move away from that moniker soon!) and talks of the current moves simply being a ‘prevent’ rather than succeed plan. Whatever it is, it leave us, out here trying to build business cases and for strategies with our customers, scrabbling a little for something solid.

As you can see from the pinout below, the IPOD connector on the iPhone supports line-in and line out although you do need to put a specific value of resistor across a couple of lines to ‘switch’ this functionality on.

Back side of dock connector;
 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30
 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29

My simple brain therefore led me to believe that is should be a simple matter of using those lines and feeding them at the correct level from the in/out of my main mixer. HAH!

The Line-Out is indeed enabled BUT the audio from phone calls is not presented on that circuit. I'm sure that this is a software thing but for the life of me I can't understand why it wouldn't be enabled in this way unless it's a simple method of controlling the ability for 3rd parties to create hand's free kits. It's bluetooth or nowt!

I did get a universal dock of eBay and I am feeding the line out from it into my mixer just in case I ever need an additional audio source but I'm disappointed that I can't use it for calls. The only way I can achieve what I want is to use the top connector on the iPhone which is a TRRS connector however this is set up to support headphones and an electret mic so I'm going to have to mess around with capacitors and resistors again, BAH!

iPhone TRRS connector

Tip - Left Audio

Ring - Rign Audio

Ring - Ground (I know!)

Shield - Mic in

I did find an interesting article by a guy who'd created a neat little box to use to record his calls, but this still relied on using 'standard' headphones and an electret mic so doesn't really help too much. Oh well, where's my soldering iron?!

The typical way of using XBox Live comms is through a headset connected to the controller. This means that there’s a microphone input to the controller and a mono output to the headset via the 2.5mm jack plug. The plug is a standard TRS (Tip, Ring, Shield) and must therefore share a common ground between the mic input and headphone output, the layout is thus:

A TRS connector - this is 1/4inch

The Tip carried the +’ve for the mic, the Ring carries the +’ve for the headphones and the Shield carries the common ground signal for both.

So the cabling isn’t that complicated, however the signal I want to feed to the controller is not at mic level, it’s going to be line level as it’s an AUX-out from my main mixer so we need to do something to attenuate that signal back. There’s also the issue that the controller is expecting to have an electret-type microphone attached and as a result supplies a voltage in order to power the mic, having this up to the line output on the mixer isn’t going to do a lot for the signal quality!

The solution for both of these issues is the following:

                 C1
+Line level in --||----R1----+-- +Mic level output
                   +         |
                             |
                  +----R2----+
                  |
Ground (input)----+--------------- Ground (output)

R1 = 10 kohm
R2 = 1 kohm
C1 = 10 uF

In practice I actually used 2 x 10K resistors in place of R1 as the levels being supplied on the Aux Out of the are still a little higher that the contoller and the audio ‘gubbins’ doing the encoding are expecting so I was getting a lot of distortion and noise – this probably gives some indication of the overall quality (or lack thereof) of the components used in the standard headset, but that’s another issue!

I tested the various configurations using the XBox Live messaging system by attaching a voice message and using the play-back to listen and set the output levels. All working very nicely!

Then I hit a wall. The ‘output’ side of the XBox Live Audio was planned to be routed into an input channel on on of the tertiary mixers – the one I have dedicated to the games consoles – and I felt confident that this would be a pretty easy task, the mixer was happy to take an unbalanced input and the cable was a simple connection to a mono 1/4 inch jack. The reality is that when I plug in the jack to the mixer by mic levels get sunk. There’s simply nothing there, in fact the XBox reports there being no connection in place. So I’m stuck!

My workaround has been to make a simple cable to carry just the mic signals so I can use my boom mic and i’ve told the XBox to send the Live output to the main speakers, it works.. but dammit it’s not right! I need to look at what’s going on, but that’s where we are now.

I’ve alos started looking at the connection of my iPhone to the audio kit for hands free calling and I’ll update that this coming week.. things are never as easy as they should be!

I’ve had a few of those recently.

That’s, I think, one of the reasons my updates here have been less than frequent and today I made the promise to myself to change all of that. There have been more than a few occasions where I’ve had a mental rant about something and come to conclusions which should be shared, there have also been a few interesting things going on in the audio studio which have also been kept secret – no reason either. So here’s the deal, I’ll be updating here more regularly about the non- and semi-work related stuff going on and I’ll also be letting you know about the other projects too.

The Project List:

1. Audio interface for iPhone to recording / mixing kit. This will be line-in and line-out from the IPOD interface, I can’t find anything out there some I’m going to make one. The point of this is to be able to take / make calls on the phone in the same way as I do for Skype, Live Meeting and other stuff, I’ll also be able to record calls for interviews etc.
2. Audio interface for Xbox Live to recording / mixing kit. Taking the feed which would go to/from the Xbox Live headset connected to the controller and using the desk to drive both the mic input and the audio received from the Live gaming sessions. Same reasons as above really.
3. Sell old bike, get new bike. I don’t think I’ve been fitter than when I was riding motorbikes, especially when I had the CR125 and did regular trips to practice tracks. With this in mind I’m going to be selling the Husqvarna SM610 and getting something I can use on and off-road. I’m thinking WR or DRZ at the moment, but it’ll depend on what’s around over the next couple of weeks.
4. Update CV. It’s been a while since this document last had a tickle and I think now’s a good enough time to get that sorted out. I’m using iProfile too – kind of an online CV for agencies etc – so I’ll marry up the two and tick that box off!

As you may, or may not, know I’m also writing on a couple of other sites (Hosting Thoughts, Ready-Up) and that’ll continue too, along with the audio work here at Studio 13 for Rogue Productions. Plus the Twitter and Facebook nonsense as well.

Holy crap! With that AND work to do I’d better get started!

“This is like being in Church!” I’m not a religious person – I respect those who are but it’s just not my bag – so this was a bit jarring. The speaker in question was very, very good. He knew just what buttons to press, he knew when to pause for reaction, he knew when to repeat point for emphasis, he knew ALL of the tricks. He also knew that his audience were drinking deeply from the corporate Kool-Aid and would lap up the digs at the competition.

This is where the jarring elements came for me. I’ve sat in on corporate keynotes before and they’ve certainly been corporate but they’ve not been ‘religious’ in their approach. By this I mean the deliberate deposing of those they believe are in competition – even those that are not, not really. The most bizarre example of this was a Microsoft Senior Executive who, during a keynote speech, took a stab at Apple and the iPhone4, describing it as “Apple’s Vista”. This of course drew cheers from the assembled congregation but I was simply left with the thought that there had to be a Vista first for that comparison to be made and that a bad version of a desktop operating system which occupies 95%+ of the market is actually a far more serious blunder than the issues which some users are seeing in signal attenuation on an otherwise good piece of hardware – one which can easily be fixed with a simple add-on.

I use both Apple and Microsoft technologies. I’ve already mentioned that I moved away from Windows Mobile to iPhone only this year but that was as a last resort when the – otherwise lovely – HTC TyTN II finally ticked me off. I use OSX and Windows 7 every day of the week and I believe that the Microsoft enterprise solutions are – on the whole – without peer. With this in mind maybe I have a more balanced view of the technology, maybe it’s my belief in using the right tools for the job, regardless of the brand it wears, which allows me to be a bit more dis-passionate about things and therefore a little more cynical about the exhortations and hyperbole which comes from the keynote speeches.

I figured that the best way to provide any sort of guidance was to run through the apps I’ve added on and what I use them for and if I can provide a little inspiration and/or help to others so be it.

1. iBooks – Self explanatory really, but I had to get a US iTunes account initially to download this app. It’s now on the UK store too of course. The latest update (as per iOS 4 release) adds in the features which were ‘missing’ when compared to the Stanza application which it is believed iBooks derives from. These features include the ability to mark text and add notes and create bookmarks for later reference. iBooks also supports PDF as a source document so is great for reference material as well as the ePub books. I use this every single night now as I read before I go to sleep.
2. Voice Recorder – As a fan of all things audio I was interested to see what (if anything) could be done on the iPad in terms of capturing audio. With the aid of the Samson Go-Mic and a pair of headphones I’m able to record interviews and other audio for later import and manipulation in Garageband.
3. Twitterific – One of  a (huge) number of Twitter clients out there. I’m Wi-Fi only but when tweeting from events and conferences it’s just the job!
4. TapTap Radiation – A simple rhythm game, I just like the music and graphics.
5. Pocket Pond – beyond simple yet very addictive. it’s a pond with fish in it, you can splash the water, release and knock down dragon flies and the fish eat them. It’s free… try it.
6. Live Messenger – it’s an iPhone App so either sits in the middle of the screen or is HUGE! But if you need to stay connected, it certainly works for that community.
7. Skype – Again an iPhone app, but either using the built in mic and speakers or the mic/headphones combo as above, certainly does the whole Skype thing well enough – NOTE: Only on WiFi not 3G.
8. iThoughtsHD – A mind-mapping application. I like this kind of note-taking mechanism as it matches how I think. has proved invaluable and well worth the few pounds it cost.
9. FryPaper – I like the way Stephen Fry thinks and writes. A must for Fry fans.
10. WoW Armory – another iPhone app but useful for WoW fans. now supports the premium services for remote auction management etc.

I’ve also set up a bunch of links on the iPad spaces for various web-sites which are then simply accessed. The above list doesn’t include the built in stuff like Safari, Email, Video, iPod, contacts etc.. because, wel you simply use them. Safari is great on the iPad expecially.

It is worth putting a note here about Videos. I’ve synced up a few audio albums – those in the “Recently Added” auto playlist in iTunes – but video is something different. I have a reasonable DVD collection (let’s call it a couple of hundred titles) but, unlike audio CDs, there is no easy way to get these into a digital format for use on your portable devices. There are a bunch of rights arguments going on and I’m not going to take any particular stance other than the personal one of “I own it so I’m watching it where I want to”. There are a few applications out there for mac and PC for DVD-to-iPad(/iPod/iPhone/etc) conversion. Some are good, some not so much. In getting my collection into digital form I’ve been through a few and I finally landed (via the well loved HandBrake) at RipIt on the Mac. This makes a copy of the DVD playable contents to your local hard drive and now supports the creation of an .m4v file with the results. This can then simply be dragged into iTunes and bingo, synco-magic. For those with an interest “Why RipIt and not HandBrake?” the answer is ARccOS.

So, @alibobbles, I hope this helps!