First, let me recommend this 4GM note over at kfmonkey. For a while it’s been pretty clear that ‘appointment based’ teevee was and is getting battered by new technology – TiVo was the thing that really crystallized out a couple of trends (time shifting, ad skipping), and as we move forward content pops up in more and odder places. Additionally the range of entertainment options available keeps growing; games (computer and console based) are an entire genre that didn’t exist at all in the heyday of 3 (here in the US) networks. It’s never been easier to be creative – there are lots of tools to make stuff: music, video, even writing – and to get your work in front of people. Sure, much of it is of questionable quality but 80% of everything is crap and a certain amount of work is produced for the pleasure of creation. So, on the one hand we have blossoming diversity and on the other hand? We have folks like the RIAA and MPAA who are desperately trying to, if not put the genie back in the bottle altogether, at least control something they can’t. The record industry’s anti-piracy efforts are a joke. They can’t be bothered to obey their own rules. They sue first graders and grandmothers. They vandalize their customer’s PCs. They’ve also managed to cripple an entire distribution channel – legal music downloads. The DRM the industry insists on is such a pain in the @ss that, in my experience, it often drive folks to abandon online music services in favor of other approaches. I don’t mess with the iTunes store or with p2p stuff – I buy used CDs, rip ’em (FLAC format – lossless) and either keep or re-sell the CD. The RIAA/MPAA customer-hostile approach is about to jump to the next level with all the ‘protection‘ features built in to Windows Vista and the hardware Vista will run on. The protection being engineered in will protect copyright holders from the folks that bought and are using the computer. I’ve got no plans to upgrade – in fact this may be the event that causes me to exit the Windows world (on machines that I own) in favor of Linux and OS X – but as someone who fields a lot of computer questions, I’m afraid… Aside from pissing a lot of folks off, I wonder what effect this mess will have on consumer electronics manufacturers and the adoption of HDTV. Sony’s consumer electronics wing is the poster child for serving 2 masters – the customer and the content folks (Sony Pictures, Sony BMG), but unfortunately, it looks like all the big guys (MS, Intel, AMD) are rolling over and playing dead rather than serving the paying customer – not usually a good business plan. Although I wouldn’t mind a nice new 16:9 teevee, I’m going to wait until the dust settles – I have better things to spend money on and I can’t shake the feeling that this is yet another attempt to rope me in to monthly fees for something I don’t need.
Category Archives: information sys
Paper Calendar: Once More Around the Sun
What, no software glitches?!? No machines getting wedged?!? All you need is a pen or pencil? Go figure… via MeFi
Calendars and Portals
I’ve been doing a little messing around hoping to make some progress on a portable calendar – a schedule I can access anywhere I have access to the net and a browser. Yes, I know that a date book would do much the same thing, but I do this kind of thing for a living – time spent goes in the professional development category. Plus – there’s the ‘ooh, blinking lights!’ factor.
Some things I wanted going in:
- Multiplatform – I have a Wintel desktop and an iBook (pre-Intel). I want to be able to schedule on either.
- Off-network capability – I want to be able to schedule something (likely on the iBook) when I don’t have a net connection.
- Visible via a browser – I want a way to look at my schedule if all I have access to is a browser.
I started by looking at how to sync an iCal (the application) schedule with a Google calendar using iCalendar (the data exchange standard). I tried a variety of approaches and ended up using Mozilla’s Sunbird on both the Mac and Windows boxes; they publish to a WebDAV folder on my server, and I can see the calendar both from Google Calendars and from a new portal I set up for myself at netvibes. Interesting tidbits I picked up along the way:
- box.net – free public WebDAV filespace. Think of this as a small web-based hard drive. You can do almost the same thing with Gmail, but this is the real thing – subfolders and everything. You can set up a 1 Gb file cache that you can access anywhere a browser is available.
- netvibes – there are a lot of portals out there; My Yahoo is the one I’ve used (it’s been a while – I have no idea what you can do with it now). Netvibes offers modules that clinched the deal for me – one will display a published iCal file, another hooks into box.net and a third shows your Gmail inbox. Here’s a screencap of my portal:
*
If you’re interested in some of the details, let me know and I can post links to some of the how-to’s I used – or you can look on del.icio.us – my ID there is dr.hypercube, too.
Sousveillance, Kramer, Tasers and the Panopticon
A couple of recent incidents have me thinking about the surveillance society again. The incidents:
- November 14th a University of California Police Department officer tasered a student in UCLA’s Powell library.
- November 19th (I think – the news was racing around the web on the 20th) Michael Richards – Kramer of Seinfeld – melted down while doing a standup routine at a club in Hollywood.
The key factor that unites these disparate messes? They were caught on video by bystanders (a quick YouTube search should turn both up – I’ll leave that as an excercise for the student). Though it’s often useful to concentrate on one aspect of technological change – in this case the panopticon (and in his defense Charlie Stross’ Great Britain is leading the way in ubiquitous surveillance) there are almost always countervailing forces and unintended consequences that get in the way. Opportunistic sousveillance may be be one of those forces. As video recording hardware gets smaller and more ubiquitous – cell phones, lipstick cams, etc. – and video distribution gets easier no one will have a monopoly on showing the world images of folks behaving badly. Not only will Cletus show up on ‘Cops’ when his meth lab gets raided, but additionally YouTube will have footage of Officer Friendly overreacting during a traffic stop.
I’ll continue to mull – sousveillance is no panacea. The state still has access to databases, facial recognition software (which – as far as I can tell – still sucks), etc. I continue to think transparency will keep free societies free, but part of me wants to prep an escape route – be ready go nomad and drop into a mobile cash/barter society that I think is already out there…
Tufte would approve (I think)
Neuros OSD
I saw this post yesterday on Engadget, announcing a beta hardware release of the Neuros OSD media box. The beta is mostly – as far as I can tell – because of the state of software development on the platform. A really interesting box (as many of Neuros’ products are) – it’ll record analog audio/video, transcode same for PSPs and iPodi, play back content, etc. The development model is wild – it’s a Linux-based platform, and Neuros is offering cash money bounties for new code that will implement specific capabilities.
Before you rush to try to buy one – too late. There were 200 units available at ThinkGeek, but they are long gone. I’m not sure how quickly it happened, but getting a post on BoingBoing was, I’m sure the kiss of death (life?).
Regarding the development model – I’ve read a couple reactions that accuse Neuros of stringing along aspiring code-jockeys in order to get software on the cheap. A comment on Engadget:
Let OSS developers do the work for a few hundreds which would cost a few tentousands if the would employ some developers. The OSS developers even have to buy the hardware by themselves. Hopefully nobody will bite the bait. This will just spoil the jobmarket and value of work for professional devs.
Talk to any Industrial Designer and if they have any experience they’ll probably tell you that many design competitions are a deceptive way for greedy companies to get designs at little or no cost. One competition not so long ago offered as a prize a small cash prize and a job. Oh, and all those entries sent in by designers too wet behind the ears to know better? Those concepts belonged to the company as part of their condition for entry.
and later in the post:
And so it goes without saying that when I read on Boing Boing (Link) about PVR manufacturer Neuros’ offer of cash rewards to those programmers/hackers who code features which (big surprise) help them sell more product, I thought of my design compatriots… too naive to see how they were hurting themselves and helping The Man. Instead of hiring a programmer who could use the money to pay off student loans or raise a family, Neuros offers a pittance to entice these people to do the work for what will probably be less than paying them minimum wage (with no health insurance).
I think both sets of observations miss an important point – the hacker authored code development was going to happen anyway. If a platform can be made to run somebody else’s software (and it seems sometimes, even if it can’t), pretty quickly a community of hackers precipitates out around the hardware. Think about the PSP – Sony is in some sense the anti-Neuros – every firmware release seems to have as one of it’s goals breaking user’s ability to run ‘homebrew’. And yet, somebody always seems to find a way to make the PSP run what they want it to run. Neuros is encouraging this – “here’s the hardware and a base OS/set of capabilities – go nuts”. Are they hoping to benefit from a vibrant user/hacker development community? Sure. Are they, by doing so, exploiting that community? There I’m not so convinced.
Further, it seems to me that reBang’s comparison between design competitions and Neuros is inaccurate in one important aspect. From Neuros’ Hacking for Cash rules:
2. All code must be licensed under GPL (or LGPL or GPL compatible licenses as appropriate). You are allowed to use code from other GPL projects, but please obey the wishes of the authors.
The design submissions became the property of the company sponsoring the competition. The code produced for Neuros does not become Neuros’ IP – it’s out there as usable, repurpose-able stuff. Will it run without modifications on a completely different platform? Almost certainly not. But, can it be ported, reused, and looked at with a view towards doing similar things in a wildly different environment? I think so.
Do I believe that Neuros is destined to succeed? I have no idea – there are a lot of things that could go wrong. I do think that to write them off as cynically trying to extract free code from a bunch of dupes is to ignore a sea change that’s happening in the world of ideas, creation and information.
Security tradeoffs.
There’s a wonderful item in Bruce Schneier’s latest Crypto-Gram that captures the balancing act between security and convenience/usability. The issue is how to bear-proof trash cans in Yosemite. The story isn’t well sourced, but it’s one that illustrates a point even if the tale can’t be verified. My favorite quote:
Said one park ranger, ‘There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.’
A tangent – I have it on good authority that the most dangerous animal in Yellowstone (besides H. sapien) is the Bison, filling the same niche in North America as the hippo does in Africa: very large, shockingly fast, single-minded people stompers.
Abecedaria naturae
An interesting paper – The Republic of Codes – looks at artificicial languages, codes vs. ciphers, and the desire on the part of academics to find ways to communicate effectively in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. I have to admit, some of this is a bit over my head – a semiotician, I’m not- but the general outline is very interesting, We meet our old friend John Wilkins and another key player in the Baroque Cycle, Gottfried Leibniz. Also making an appearance – Athanasius Kircher (aka The Last Man to Know Everything). There is a link to the Kircher Society in my blogroll.
Coincidentally, I’m reading a history of the Silk Road. The Nestorian Stele (mentioned in The Republic of Codes) pops up there in the context of religious and cultural flows along the trade route.
To err is human.
To completely fubar something requires mid to upper management types and PowerPoint. I’ve sat through more than my share of mind-numbing bullet-point recitations – I tend to agree with Edward Tufte that PowerPoint has been, taken as a whole, a net loss to the sum of human knowledge. Crooked Timber’s John Holbo (he of the pony) has a great post on PowerPoint’s use and misuse in the Pentagon. It’s really quite chilling – slides as a substitute for orders. More info here.
Borges’ Number
I discovered it while looking for his famous classification of animals. The number is the population of books in the Library of Babel – a universe which contains every possible 410 page book using 25 characters and with 40 lines per page, 80 characters per line. Your complete life story (including the parts that have not happened yet) is in there – the trick is finding it.
The original search – for the classification – turned up an additional connection. The title of the essay containing Borges’ list is ‘The Analytical language of John Wilkins‘. Wilkins, mathmatician, cryptographer, founder of the Royal Society, figures into Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Wilkins did in fact try to create an a-priori language.
Two thoughts… First, I really need to find a copy of Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language. Second – Argentina looks better and better as a place to relocate to. Big sky, Buenos Aires, tango, horse culture, grills, and they produced Borges. Yow.
Third thought (later) – Artur C. Clarke’s Nine Billion Names of God.
Killer app for sysadmin types
VMWare server. I’ve been using Workstation for a while to test things – I ‘discovered’ it at a Novell ATT class more than a couple years ago – but the Server product is wonderful. I’m setting up a Win2003 server as a host that will run an NT4 server (legacy domain), at least one NetWare 6.5 server and will have horsepower left over for other things, although the other things will also run as virtual machines – I want to keep the host OS as clean as possible. I no longer have to worry about drivers for Netware, etc. and as I get more Linux literate, swapping to RH or Suse as a host OS might be a possibility.
Data Preservation/File Formats
Good coincidence in my nosing around today. This post on boingboing sent me (eventually) to a related couple posts on Mark Pilgrim’s new-to-me blog. Reader’s Digest version – Mark is moving to Ubuntu Linux after 20+ years of Mac use because of frustration with closed file formats:
I’m creating things now that I want to be able to read, hear, watch, search, and filter 50 years from now. Despite all their emphasis on content creators, Apple has made it clear that they do not share this goal. Openness is not a cargo cult. Some get it, some don’t. Apple doesn’t.
Here’s the bit of coincidence – I’m 30 or so pages into a new book by Charlie Stross – Glasshouse – and one of the bits of future history revealed early on is that the period from 1950 to about 2040 is a dark age – no one can figure out what went on back then, because no one can decipher the data format/media format/etc. mess (BTW – so far the book is a rippin’ yarn).
This issue isn’t a new one by any means – Neal Stephenson talked about it in his 1999 essay “In the Beginning was the Command Line”, and I worked in a place where we kept archived 7-track tapes in the tape vault (for legal reasons?) long after the last drive that would read 7 track G200 tapes was long gone. Still, it’s one of those things that makes you go, “hmmm…”.