O'ReillyGMT - Tech News from 4 timezones either side of the Greenwich Meridian

iMovie '09 and iDVD: The Missing Manual - David Pogue, Aaron Miller

9780596801410: iMovie '09 and iDVD: The Missing Manual by David Pogue, Aaron Miller - Prices: £30.99

Apple's iMovie '09 is vastly more usable and complete than iMovie '08 -- and amazing right out of the box. But the box doesn't include much of a user's guide, so learning these applications is another matter. iMovie '09 and iDVD: The Missing Manual gets you up to speed on everything you need to turn raw digital footage into highly creative video projects.

Bursting with new features, Apple's iMovie '09 is vastly more usable and complete than iMovie '08 -- amazing right out of the box. But the box doesn't include a good user's guide, so learning these applications is another matter. iMovie '09 and iDVD: The Missing Manual gets you up to speed on everything you need to turn raw digital footage into highly creative video projects.

You get crystal-clear, jargon-free explanations of iMovie's new video effects, slow & fast motion, advanced drag & drop, video stabilization, and more. Author and New York Times tech columnist David Pogue uses an objective lens to scrutinize every step of process, including how to:

• Organize your videos just like your photos, and precisely edit with ease
• Work on multiple iMovie projects at once and drag & drop clips among them
• Integrate with other iLife programs to use songs, photos, and an original sound track
• Output your creation to a blog, its own web page, or as a video podcast with iWeb
• Understand basic film techniques to improve the quality of the video you bring to iMovie

From choosing and using a digital camcorder to burning the finished work onto DVDs, posting it online, or creating versions for iPod and iPhone, iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual helps you zoom right in on the details.

R&DTV - Tech Interviews from the BBC R&D

The BBC R&D have just launched R&DTV. George Wright says:

Today we launch a new trial aimed at exploring new ways to create, edit and distribute online video. It's called R&DTV. We've done this in collaboration with colleagues in BBC Backstage, part of BBC R&D.

 It's a pilot show, designed to be sharable, remixable and redistributable. It's released under a Creative Commons Attribution (Non-Commercial) licence, and looks at interesting tech stories inside and outside the BBC. The first episode features Nicholas Negroponte (talking about the OLPC project), Kevin Rose from digg.com, Graham Thomas from BBC Research and Ant Miller / George Auckland from the BBC discussing the BBC Micro. Hemmy Cho and Rain Ashford were the producers

To quote from the FTP site -'R&DTV is a monthly technology programme made up of interviews from knowledgeable BBC developers, project experts and experts from around the world.

Francesco Cesarini - Erlang Factory

Francesco Cesarini of Erlang Training and Consulting and co-author of Erlang Programming spoke to me at QCon about Erlang Factory, which is due to take place in San Francisco and London in April and June respectively.

Ivan Pope on Widgets

Ivan Pope talked to me about why widgets are increasingly important in the webbed world. Apologies for the machine noise in the background - Brighton was being spring-cleaned while we were doing the interview.

Jon Masters - Building Embedded Linux Systems 2e

I spoke to Jon Masters, co-author of Building Embedded Linux Systems 2e, on the O'Reilly Stand at Linux Live:

Jon Masters - Building Embedded Linux Systems 2e from oreillygmt on Vimeo.

A Car's Life - The First Ever Interactive Game In YouTube

One of my colleagues at O'Reilly in the States pointed us to this YouTube game from Hexolabs, from Kanpur, India, billing itself as the First Ever Interactive Game In YouTube. It's good fun, and nicely done:

Make Your Own Biodiesel

With the August Bank Holiday Weekend arriving in the UK, maybe this is the opportunity you've been waiting for to create some Biodiesel. But where can you find quality instructions for how to make Biodiesel, I hear you ask. Well, in Make, of course. And it is an American, Kip Kay, who gives the fine presentation, and another American, Rob Elam, who wrote the original article, Biodiesel was invented in Belgium:

Where it did come from?
"On August 31, 1937, G. Chavanne of the University of Brussels (Belgium) was granted a patent for a 'Procedure for the transformation of vegetable oils for their uses as fuels' (fr. 'Procédé de Transformation d’Huiles Végétales en Vue de Leur Utilisation comme Carburants') Belgian Patent 422,877. This patent described the alcoholysis (often referred to as transesterification) of vegetable oils using ethanol (and mentions methanol) in order to separate the fatty acids from the glycerol by replacing the glycerol with short linear alcohols. This appears to be the first account of the production of what is known as 'biodiesel' today."
Source: Wikipedia

David Heinemeier Hansson - Ruby on Rails, Startups, Culture

O'Reilly Media have a channel on YouTube featuring interviews with key technologists. Here's David Heinemeier Hansson in Wicker Park in Chicago:

Wendy Devolder - Skillsmatter

Skillsmatter are a London-based training and technology company who specialise predominantly in Open Source and Agile development. They do a great deal of work at the grass roots level helping developers of nascent technologies establish a community, fanning the flames of emergent trends. Slowly but surely, they are spreading their wings to continental Europe.

I spoke to lynch-pin Wendy Devolder about their tutorials, events and advocacy.

Wendy Devolder - Skillsmatter from oreillygmt on Vimeo.

Chris Heilmann on GMT Extra

Over on GMT Extra, we have a glorious interview with Chris Heilmann, International Developer Evangelist for the Yahoo! Developer Network. In fact, it's two glorious interviews, a video interview at Mashed08 and a text interview conducted in a cafe on Shaftsbury Avenue in London last year:

People like Aral Balkan in the UK working together with Steve Webster, who has written all sorts of Flash and ActionScript books. He’s just an amazing developer: it doesn’t matter what kind of language you put in front of him, he would grasp it. And that’s a skill set I wouldn’t expect from a Flash developer because of the way it has been branded in the past. And its just a shame that if an interface is cool and easy to sell that people fall into the trap of becoming that interface deliverer rather than an interface developer.