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Although some wireless/cellular operators and vendors have already been using the term “4G” for their LTE and WiMAX services, the “true” specifications for 4G services developed by standards organization 3GPP  will be published in March 2011 under Release 10, according to current targets.

Read more of the original article at Total Telecom

The call comes ahead of a proposed NSW State Government trial of mobile phone jammers in Lithgow gaol which if successful could make Australia one of about 10 countries to legalise the practice.

Australian and New Zealand heads of correctional services agreed at a Corrective Services Ministers’ Conference in June 2008 to plan the use of phone jammers in prisons and sent the communications watchdog a submission last March. New Zealand has already legalised and is expanding its use of jammers in correctional facilities……..

Read more of the original article at Computer World.

Read the complete article at PCWorld Tech Insider

While breaking the security takes time, the approach theoretically leaves GSM more directly exposed to call interceptions and other threats. Most cellular carriers still use the lower-grade GSM quality (A5/1) as their base calling technology, but 3G/UMTS (the upgrade to GSM) uses Kasumi and is potentially exposed as well.

More information:- http://www.emergentchaos.com/archives/2010/01/another_week_another_gsm.html

The usage indicator on my BigPond wireless broadband account has been broken since November 2009. There is some kind of server problem accessing the information for my account. I have a request in with BigPond technical support to fix it, but in the meantime I am not able to tell how much data I have used.

Last month I ran over my 10GB allowance due to having to reinstall Abode Creative Suites and eLearning Suite twice. They did not load correctly the first time, and each reinstall came with an 850MB update download…..Ouch!!!….. It must be time for CS5 release.

For a few days my broadband speed was limited to 64kbps, and this makes the whole internet experience quite different. Having to sit and wait several minutes for pages to download, if they download at all, can be very trying on anyone’s patience.

I remember in the old days of website development, you would optimize the page to download in less than 30 seconds @56 kbps.

The art of optimizing page download speed seems to have been lost, and I put this down to several factors:-

• The increasing availability of broadband.
• Most of the web designers today are too young to remember 56kbps.
• Auto coding web development programs.
• Photo and video content not being optimized.

Working on a Slow Connection

Several reputable sites I visited took over 3 minutes to load a page, and in the end I gave up on them.

There are still a lot of people out there using slow connections in remote areas and other countries, and site designers not allowing for low data rates, they are losing customers.

One of the big surprises was social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. For a long time I had thought they were basic in design and kind of ugly looking, but on my slow connection they all loaded very fast. There has obviously been some thought put into these sites under the hood, and this could be part of the reason for their popularity worldwide…. other site designers should take a lesson from this.

Experimenting Back on Broadband

When I received my high speed connection back, I did several experiments with page download times, while paying close attention to the connection download meter.

One on the most telling results came from reading entries linked to Twitter. I normally check a day’s worth of Twitter messages at one time, and opened 20 linked pages. The total data usage for this was 70 MB…. That’s an average of 3.5 MB per page….

Some pages ran over 5MB, and one static text page with lots of flashing bits on the sidebar exceeded 7MB … How do these sites expect to retain viewers on slow connections with this kind of overhead??

I measured a plain text page on one of my own Wordpress sites today using the Yslow plug-in for Firefox, and was surprised to see the PHP page was 425kB with 41 different http requests. The same page in HTML is 12kB. It’s nice to have these programs auto coding pages, but it comes at the price of download speed.

It’s very similar to when computer memory became cheap, and all the coding optimization skills were lost in software development.

Some Common Sense on the Horizon

I was listening to web professional Marc Fuller on the Camera Dojo podcast with Kerry Garrison the other day. It was very interesting what Marc had to say about website design, SEO and Wordpress.

One point Marc mentioned was that in 2010 Google will be looking to focus on webpage download speeds, with fast loading pages benefiting more favorably in the page ranking algorithm.

We are also starting to see site caching become quite popular in software such as Wordpress.

I hope these developments will get website designers thinking a bit more about visitor friendly layouts and designs, and dropping a few of the “data heavy” bells and whistles.

As they say…. LESS is MORE …

Additional Information:-

• Googles Matt Cutts Talks Caffeine and Site Speed
• Tools from Google and other developers, and start making your site & web apps faster.
• Articles on web performance. Discover best practices that can make your apps faster.

In the last few days I have been converting a few courses from Adobe Captivate 4 to Video and evaluating the slide quality that was being output. It suddenly occurred to me that developing courseware for use across multiple learning platforms (including mobile learning), requires the use of more image-based presentations and minimal use of text.

This idea might seem obvious, but it is not something I have thought about until now, and is going to completely change the way I develop courseware in the future.

I am the sort of person who likes to design a course once and be able to scale it up and down for the different platforms, without having to modify the courseware for each individual platform. This also means that any updates or modifications need only be made to the master file, and can be redistributed easily down the track.

Example 1 – Text Based Slides

My past courses were designed for 720×540 pixels, with some text-based slides for displaying lists of information.

The text can be easily seen when viewed on large formats.

However when you scale this down to mobile screens, text becomes difficult to read, and the screen space is effectively wasted.

Example 2  – Animated Slides

Animated slides and those using larger text fonts are still viewable down to mobile screen sizes.

Conclusion

When developing courseware that can be easily converted to various learning platforms, it is best to use image-based layouts with large fonts, rather than text-based layouts.

This allows for:-

• Easy resizing for multiple learning platforms, without any modifications for each individual platform.
• Easy update redistribution, with modifications only needed to the master file.

Captivate 4 can output AVI video, but in the past this has been a hit or miss approach for me due to the quirks of the various codecs.

Having some spare time, I decided to sit down and experiment with the different codecs to determine what works, and the options that can be used with Adobe Media Encoder to produce an acceptable final product on my Windows XP machine.

Test Courses

For this experiment I created two different sized courses.

Test Course 1 – with animation slide and font test slide, each with audio.

Test File 1:-

• Resolution: 720 x 540
• Run time: 2 minutes 58 seconds.
• Number of slides: 3
• Frames: 5343 (30fps)
• SWF Flash file size: 1.97MB

Test Course 2 – with text, image and animation slides, each with audio.

Test file 2:-

• Resolution: 720 x 540
• Run time: 7 minutes 16 seconds.
• Number of slides: 8
• Frames: 13083 (30fps)
• SWF Flash file size: 4.83 MB

Codecs

There are two important aspects to a video file:-

• The Container – The file type for transporting the video.
• The Codec – The Encoder/Decoder that tells the video player how to view the video.

Adobe Captivate 4 uses AVI files as the container.

The codecs available to Adobe Captivate 4 are dependent on the various video software packages installed on your machine. The available codecs can be seen if you select Publish in Captivate, choose Media in the left hand menu, and click the Video Format drop down.

My Windows XP machine contains the following video codecs:-

• Cinepak Codec by Radius
• Indeo video 5.10
• MJPEG Compressor
• DivX 6.0 Codec
• DV Video Encoder
• Pinnacle MPEG 2 Encoder
• WMVideo 9 Encoder DMO

I tried each of these codecs on the two test files to see the results.

Captivate Processing

It should be noted that it takes quite a bit of processing power to convert courses to AVI. Often you will find the SWF to AVI conversion will appear to stall at various points during rendering of the video, but this is just the program doing its thing. The larger the course, the more often it will appear to stall.

Table 1 – AVI file output sizes

Table 1 shows the output AVI videos file sizes produced when exporting AVI with the different codecs. The size varies with how well the codec compresses the video.

The Pinnacle MPEG 2 Encoder went through the rendering process but did not produce an output file. The Windows Media Video 9 encoder produced an error in Captivate, and the DivX encoder stalled in Captivate and did not finish.

Table 2- Media Player Results.

To check the quality of the AVI output files, I tried running them directly in Quicktime and Windows Media Player.

Quicktime was only able to display the AVI video for the MJPEG and DV Video Encoder, but in both cases the text was blurred or distorted.

Windows Media Player displayed acceptable video and audio for the Cinepak, MJPEG and Microsoft Video encoders. It could only play audio for the Indeo video, and the text was blurred on the DV Video Encoder.

I expect Windows Media Player has several more codec plug-ins installed than the Quicktime player, allowing it to decode the video files correctly.

Adobe Media Encoder Processing

For the following tests I imported the AVI files into Adobe Media Encoder and set the output size for 640×480 pixels, with a H.264 output format using the Youtube SD preset, and a FLV output format using the Web Large preset.

Table 3- Adobe Media Encoder Results

Each Testfile1 AVI was imported and output correctly for each codec, however the text for the DV Video output was distorted.

Adobe Media Encoder truncated all the AVI input files except the MJPEG Compressor, with only the first 2 slides imported from the AVI files.

The MJPEG compressor AVI file was the only one that was imported into Adobe Media Encoder correctly, and produced the correct output.

Conclusion

Due to the much smaller file sizes, SWF is the best option to use when supported.

For Youtube, Apple iPhone and other applications where Flash SWF is not supported, video can be created from non-interactive courses in Adobe Captivate.

The codec chosen for rendering the video determines:-

• The size of the resultant video file.
• The time to render the video.
• The compatibility with video players.
• The compatibility with other video converters such as Adobe Media Encoder.

On my Windows XP machine, the best workflow is to export the AVI file using MJPEG Compressor codec, input the resulting AVI file into Abode Media Encoder, and encode for H264 or FLV format. This resulting video can then be used on Youtube or other video platforms. This does come at a price with the AVI file being very large in size.

At present Adobe Captivate is only available for windows users, but a Mac version is coming soon. I hope that when it is released, the creative Mac community will be able to pressure Adobe to address the process of outputting courses to video in a friendly workflow for environments that do not support Flash.

I hope this has been helpful, and would be interested in hearing if anyone else has another workflow.

Other useful links:-

• Tips to Publish to AVI in Adobe Captivate
• Adobe Media encoder CS4 – File formats supported for import.
• Adobe in Technical communication and eLearning – a blog by Senior Adobe Product Evangelist RJ Jacquez
• The Adobe Captivate Blog

Obviously there’s a lot of  outrage at the government’s decision to plough ahead with its plans.

Some limits, like child pornography are obvious, but moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime which includes politically controversial sites like pro-euthanasia sites, the Government will be stifling debate about these topics by restricting access to the sides of the argument they disagree with.

Back in May when the ACMA blacklist leaked to Wikileaks, it was made clear that only 32% of blocked sites were related to child porn. The other 68% included legitimate sites, YouTube videos and political sites.

Related articles:-

• Aust govt to press on with net filtering law
• Australia pushes ahead with controversial Internet filter
• Some Obligatory Reading On The Internet Filter Issue
• Untangling the Net – The Scope of Content Caught by Mandatory Internet Filtering
• How To Protest Against Internet Censorship Laws
• Telstra, Optus And Primus All Announce Support For Conroy’s Filter
• Internet filtering – did the Government just blink?