Live from Orlando, It's Saturday Night

I'm in Orlando covering the big PMA digital photography show for digitalcamerainfo.com. I'll be doing three video reports from the show. The first one is up now. Please be gentle - We're still learning about web video! (Requires Flash player.)

PMA Second Day

Day two of my PMA coverage is up on DigitalCameraInfo.com. In this one I cover the new 8-megapixel Canon Digital Rebel, the CoolPix 7900, and new cameras from Kodak and Pentax.

Podcast Change

I've been working with Michael Freedman at Coral to come up with a solution to the podcast issues some of you have been experiencing. As you may know I use Coral to distribute the bandwidth costs for my podcasts. To quote from the Coral site:

Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem.

Coral is part of the IRIS peer-to-peer network project funded by the National Science Foundation, and it's an amazing community service. Essentially, Coral is a distributed network of volunteer servers that cache content for web sites. When I post a new podcast I use a modified URL: http://www.leoville.tv.nyud.net:8090/airchecks/20050306-1.mp3 for example. A request for that file goes first to nyud.net over port 8090 - that's Coral central. It will route the request to the geographically nearest Coral server. The server will check to see if it has a copy of the file. If it does not it will check with other Coral servers. If none of them have a cached copy of the file they will download it from leoville.tv and cache it for future requests. For the next 24 hours requests for that file will be served by Coral not leoville.tv.
This map of US Coral servers is from the Coral site and is, itself, Coralized. This greatly reduces the bandwidth requirements for leoville.tv and provides users with faster servers that are closer to home. Because there are many Coral servers no one server should have to do too much work, but to protect the volunteers there is a quota system in place. When any one site, like leoville.tv, draws too much bandwidth, that server can decline the Coral request with a 403 FORBIDDEN error. We have exceeded quota with every single podcast release. In fact, Mike tells me we're one of the top 5 Coral users. This has caused a problem with some podcast clients. Instead of retrying later, they give up, saying the file does not exist and you'll miss a podcast. Michael has implemented a new system that allows me to tell the Coral servers to redirect excess traffic back to leoville.tv. If I've saturated Coral's bandwidth I will serve the file directly for a while. That means my bandwidth costs go up, but it doesn't confuse podcast clients. This system has been implemented starting with the current KFI podcast (shows from March 5 and 6). Please let me know if your podcast client has any problems with these files. You shouldn't see any 403 errors. Thanks for your patience. Just so you know, you're involuntary guinea pigs in a brand new medium. But the combination of podcasting and Coral P2P makes it feasible for anyone, even with very limited bandwidth, to create programming that the whole world can download, and I think that's tremendously exciting. You're helping change the face of broadcasting!

Podcast Meetup

Ross Rader is hosting a Toronto area meetup for podcasters at the Lone Star Grill this Tuesday evening. Two Californians, Eric Rice and I, will be there, too. RSVP at Ross's blog. Speaking of podcasts, there are two new postings on TLR:

1. My weekly visit with Bill Handel, Fridays on KFI - we talk about the Harmony universal remote
2. My weekly tech news summary with John Donabie this morning on CFRB

Sunday evening Kevin, Patrick, Robert Heron, and I are going to try our first Skype-based podcast. I'm calling it TROTSS - an acronym for The Revenge of The Screen Savers. If all goes well I'll push it out on the TLR channel Monday morning.

The Revenge of the Bleep

It is done. The first ROTSS has been posted. Subscribe to the podcast to get it by midnight every Sunday, press the play button to the left, or download it directly. It's a 56kbps MP3Pro file weighing in at around 14MB. Join Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, Robert Heron, and me for 34 minutes of Skyping fun as we discuss driving in the dust, cell phones, Kevin's new webcast, systm, and the demise of TechTV. We plan to do this weekly with a rotating cast of characters. Your input is welcome. (Anyone want to design a logo? - Update: Thanks to all of you who sent in logos. The one you see here is by Lori LeBeau-Walsh. G4 has told us that they intend to reserve rights to the name "The Screen Savers" so we'll be considering other choices.) Theme music this week from Wayne and Wax's CD "Boston Jerk." Incidentally, I'm very happy to report that another Screen Saver alumna, Megan Morrone, delivered twin boys on Friday, Huck and Milo weigh in at over seven pounds each. All are doing well, but don't expect Megan to make an appearance on ROTSS any time soon! UPDATE: Welcome slashdot readers. By popular demand, I've created Vorbis and plain MP3 versions of the show. I had hoped to upload them to OurMedia.com but it's not working right now. For the time being I'll host them locally. To defray bandwidth costs, please use the Coral Mirror unless it's not working for you. I'll do this for all future episodes. We plan to record again this Sunday and Yoshi will be joining us. Plain MP3: Coral Mirror - Local Ogg Vorbis: Coral Mirror - Local