It looks like the age of nutty record attempts is alive and well. I've just been to grab myself a dollop of the world's largest curry.

A group of students and staff from Suffolk College decided to stage a charity world record attempt to make the worlds largest curry. It's been cooking all day, so I popped down to drop a donation and grab a tub full, and we'll be eating it for dinner tonight. Mmmm...

There's been some mumbling recently about the poor state of print magazines for Java (Alan Williamson, ex JDJ Editor-in-Chief) writes

I personally believe that the best people to morph into print is one of the large online communities. JavaLobby I see as just a less dumber version of Slashdot; no real meat with just a lot of ranting. TheServerSide is slipping into the rant mode of late, with only the likes of JavaWorld and JavaGuru being potential candidates with their large back catalogue of quality content. Ironically, the best company to do a Java magazine, would be IBM. Their ibm.com/java is full of juicy content that is ripe for printing.

I can't help thinking that he's forgotton at least one other major Java online community, but in general, I like the idea. For me, the number one thing a magazine needs is credibility. One of the best ways to get that, it would seem, is to leverage the respect of a trusted source of genuine knowledge.

Personally I'd be very wary of a magazine from IBM. Their skillful and well-funded corporate marketing machine would find it extremely tempting to "spin" the content in their favour

Paul Chenoweth at "Chasing the Dragon's Tale" has had a go at a video diary-style blog entry. In the spirit of geeks everywhere, both the video entry and the associated text are primarily about the technology and the production of the video itself. No more than 10% of the video content is actual 'content'. That's to be expected from a first post in a new medium, I guess.

I liked the idea of using an interesting background for the piece to camera. However, I would have loved some sort of link to information about the park, campsite and cave, and maybe the music. With all the fun of video it's important to remember that it is often the links that bring a blog entry to life, converting a dull diary entry to a real research/learning experience. A user interface for hyperlinks in video has yet to be sorted out, though, so I guess these would need to be in the accompanying text for the moment.

I found the breakdown of the time and effort involved in the production of the video segment to be very interesting. The last time I did any analysis like this, the time ratios were much worse. In my case a short movie of a little over 3 minutes duration took about 8 hours of setup and filming and about 24 hours of editing and titling. My project was a multi-scene shoot with two actors and a lighting rig, and I was using old-fashioned video-video editing, though. It looks like the technology implications of simple firewire connections and laptop video editing software may be the really positive force that we need to get this sort of thing off the ground.

Looking at Paul's progress, and thinking about how it might heve been streamlined even further, I noticed the time and movement taken in setting up the camera and sound. It seemed to need several takes and some twiddling to get it right. Maybe a discretely positioned LCD monitor and/or headphones cabled together with the mic would help get this right quicker and with less getting up and sitting down. Or maybe taking a step back from "proper" video quality and doing the whole thing using a webcam.

While reflecting on this I keep bouncing back and forth on the idea of whether some sort of autocue or prompt system would be useful in this situation. On the one hand it would help give a more measured, professional impression on the finished video. On the other hand it could lose the immediacy and personal nature of a blog post and become more like someone reading an article with nice scenery in the background. Paul doesn't say how much he had planned what he was to say in advance, although I'm guessing that this was largely ad lib rather than read or memorized.

Well done Paul, you've got me all keen to do this myself, now...