The avatar

I've been using the same avatar for many years now. A few times people have asked about it's origin. The avatar is a cropped part of the picture on the right.

The monkey is a snow macaque in an onsen at Jigokudani, near Nagano, Japan. For those of you familiar with the movie Baraka, these are the same group of monkeys that are depicted at the beginning of Baraka, dozing in the hot spring bath.

I took the picture in 1999, while living in Japan.

Long time between updates.

It's been almost a year since the last update to this blog. A lot of stuff has happened. I've done research and development work for IceTV, working on projects such as PIMP, PIMP for mobile devices, IceBox2, IceGuide solutions for a number of third party PVRs and many other projects that remain either confidential or unnamed.

As a result of the Channel Nine legal challenge, the IceTV IPO was canceled, which affected the amount of funds available for research and development. The net result was that even though IceTV would have been very keen to have my services and I would have liked to do R&D for IceTV, I had to look elsewhere to find paid work.

That paid work is being the technical lead on a new class of a home entertainment product. It's an interesting blend of new and old technology applied in a pragmatic manner. Rather than being carried away by the technological possibilities, the development has concentrated on the expectations of the average person.

There are both good and bad sides to developing such a device. The hardest part is the dumbing down of the product. There are so many possibilities that the tech-savvy power user could and would have in the device, but in the grand scheme, these features would only confuse 90% of the potential users. On the opposite side of the spectrum is implementing the obvious features, which more often than not present problems that are hard to solve. Take, for example, the ability to treat analogue and digital inputs in exactly the same way. A reasonable expectation, yet there are many scenarios where it starts getting complicated and expensive in terms of hardware design.

The product is not something I would have designed for myself, it is something intended for the in-laws and their friends. They don't care whether the phone uses CDMA or GPRS, whether the TV is analogue or digital, whether the car stereo plays MP3 or 8-track. They just want it to work without having to think very hard about which button to press. There are millions of people like that out there.

On the plus side, if we get this right, just about everyone in Australia would have heard of the product by this time next year.