Joost

Tried out the 0.8 beta of Joost formerly the "The Venice Project" on windows. This is an IPTV platform based on P2P technology headed-up by the Skype guys. The shocking part for me, being used to the low-res download jitter of YouTube is that it actually does what it says on the tin. When I first started it up, there were lots of pauses and delays. Resizing down the window from fullscreen and letting the beast run for a bit seemed to help and eventually I was watching TV on-demand. The quality of the video is decent - much better than say YouTube. That said I wouldnt' watch it in fullscreen mode, for the same reasons I don't watch terrestrial television in full-HD mode - pixelation/digital artifacts annoy me. It's better viewed in small screen mode. Still decent enough to watch, not as good as good as an Xvid torrent of your favourite show (btw: check out Zudeo this is site from azureus team).

Admittedly the standard gripe "there's nothing on" applies here - some car programs, national geographic, cartoons etc, but presumably that will get better. But it works. The gotcha is Joost should only be used for people with no download limits.

The interface is nice and simple, channels on the left, widgets on the right. The widgets allow you to do various things while watching TV, e.g. chat (like an IRC channel per program), search, browse news feeds.

Yahoo Pipes

This completely rocks - yahoo pipes allows you to remix RSS feeds visually - in a DHTML/Flash IDE in the browser. The metaphor is Unix pipes. Setup an RSS input (URL) and then create a sequence of pipes (filters, transformers). You can then publish the result. I was able to create a pipe that filtered RSS feeds from developer.capeclear.com, to filter only XSLT related forums in about 1 minute.

Plus, it has an interactive-ish debugger. Sweeet. Check it out.

Just enough XML to survive

James Pasley has posted a video which explains the basics of XML, SOAP and WSDL in 15 minutes for people who've never encountered them before. This is pretty useful stuff - kinda, an XML and Web Services for newbies. You can place requirements on a talk, such as "should be familiar with XML", but no one ever pays attention to that and even if they wanted to familiarize themselves, where would they start? Now you know. Link to video here.