CeBIT Australia 2005

24 May 2005

Attended this one this afternoon – it was rather impressive, with over 600 exhibitors. I was surprised by the prevalence of open-source businesses there… that, along with VoIP, were probably the two emergent technologies this year. There were also the usual business CRM/”knowledge” drones, but they generally stuck to themselves, so that was okay.

Aside from that, various content management systems were out in force – including one or two that apparently haven’t caught onto the semantic web yet. Most notably, one was demoing their CMS on a massive plasma screen with blatantly obvious character encoding errors everywhere (you know, characters displaying as black diamonds with question marks). I quizzed one of them about it and he basically said that it was something to do with their not demoing it on a live site. Bull.

If you can’t get that sort of stuff right at a trade show, when you’re trying to sell products, what are the chances of actually being able to deliver?

Another provider, Netcat.biz, seemed to have the right idea in terms of sematics at least in their presentation at CeBIT, but a quick check of their own website reveals a lack of a DOCTYPE, despite their use of CSS for presentation and a not-too-horrible (or relatively easy to patch up) markup situation.

There’s still clearly a market for truly accessible content management, although I doubt many business customers would actually know the difference. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of it, and possibly why neither of these two companies (there were other CMS exhibitors, but those two stood out as most ‘impressive’, regardless as to the quality of their solution) have bothered to develop such a product.

Sigh.

Whilst I’m on a bit of a rant, the exhibition had a blatantly sexist culture happening. ATI and Sapphire were probably the worst offenders, employing lycra bodysuits to attract attention, but they were by no means the only ones. Short skirts were the norm for many female salespeople at the event – one has to wonder when the IT industry is going to grow up.

In all, however, the event was impressive – signage and event displays were wonderfully over-the-top, exhibitors, for the most part, knew what they were talking about, and free coffee abounded!

Who wrote…

23 May 2005

One of the strangest sensations I’ve experienced recently is reading something I’ve written as little as a day or two later and wondering if I really wrote it. It happened to me just then, and it was absolutely bizarre.

Not the content so much as the style – this was completely foreign, as though it had been written by someone else. That I was reading it having just tabbed from a slightly-more-conversational chat session into it probably exacerbated its apparent distance, but even without this, I think it would have felt as though written by another person.

Stranger still, it doesn’t even reflect the style of anything else I’ve recently read, so this difference can’t simply be attributed to an ‘inherited’ or acquired voice… at least, not explicitly. Either way, it’s a bizarre feeling reading something you know you wrote and finding it completely unknown!

Addiction

23 May 2005

“There’s nothing wrong with being an addict!”

–Tori

Useless from Egypt

22 May 2005

These things apparently cost $0.06 and get through customs without any hassle, although one has to wonder why. They’re wooden scarab beetles, and have no apparent purpose, but are supposedly sold on streets everywhere (probably just to tourists).

Uh huh!

totem-xine and playing nice with esound

22 May 2005

Totem is great, but adding plugins via its brilliant drag-and-drop-couldn’t-be-easier “Add Proprietary Plugins” interface does absolutely nothing if you’re using the totem-gstreamer version (the default that ships with Ubuntu). Switching to totem-xine makes the playback with these plugins possible, but potentially introduces problems of its own.

The inbuilt configuration of Totem is pretty poor, but thankfully there’s a way around it. The actual configuration exists in a hidden folder in your home directory – for me, this is /home/josh/.gnome2/ – the file you’re looking for is totem_config

For me, it was simply a case of uncommenting audio.driver and setting it to “esd” (audio.driver:esd) – but depending on what distribution and sound server you’re using, YMMV.

Anyway, Totem now works great, and I have cooler visualisations than gstreamer’s!