Potato I have

Simon Phipps has an excellent post on open data formats. Looking for a connection between a lot of new desktop tools, he notes:

all of these tools have worked out that lock-in is the new lock-out

And later:

injecting the network into society removes the commercial benefits previously achieved by closed behaviour […]. Truly open formats are creating the new market, and those who attempt to subvert the trend with pseudo-openness will fail.

While my sensitivity is not nearly as evolved as Mark Pilgrim’s outrage, Apple’s mostly closed data models are a doggedly nagging annoyance in my otherwise pleasant Dive Into Mac one year ago. I know where I want to go, and over time I’ll migrate my digital life into apps and formats that make me feel like the stuff is actually mine. It would be just ideal if Apple would move in this direction faster than I do, because I am so not in a place where I want to spend time doing what Fowler did here.

But how many people understand or care about open data? Far from enough to nudge Apple in a different direction I suspect.

(via t.bray)

I’ve been listening to this music for twenty years, but like a lot of us I wasn’t able to watch Coltrane or Evans or Wes Montgomery. Now I see YouTube starts to have some old concerts and TV shows.

I particularly like this one of Coltrane’s Quartet playing Naima somewhere in Europe (on Arte!) in 1965. Grainy B&W, very good camera work, and Elvin Jones is literally steaming – how great is that?

What do you make of Cecil Taylor’s facial expressions after he finishes playing here?

Someone in one of the comment threads laments the extreme paucity of recorded video of this amazing era; at the moment, I’m mighty happy to have stumbled on to some of it here.

I’m much more visual than aural, but podcasts are proving a really good channel for me, somewhat to my surprise. Here’s one where Cory Doctorow discusses DRM and related stuff in “Europe’s Coming Broadcast Flag” (thanks again IT Conversations), recorded at last year’s European Open Source convention. Cory is an excellent presenter, and these are important topics. To paraphrase one part of the talk:

• security systems have sender(s), recipient(s), and attacker(s)
• DRM is a security system that considers the user(s) — who own the content — as the attacker(s)!
• users can therefore not be allowed to modify the system (so, no open source solutions)
• we can’t know if a system is secure if it is not “published” (=open source)

Lots of other interesting viewpoints on copyright, innovation, etc in the digital world.

Cory has also accepted a Fulbright at USC to work on DRM.

Okay, I’ve been bitten by the podcast bug. Listening, not creating. Now I’m trawling through old stuff I missed because I was still reading blogs. IT Conversations is proving valuable.

Here’s one I heard this weekend from Kent Beck on developer testing (recorded November 2004!). TDD and refactoring are the two big software development epiphanies for me in the last 4-5 years, and Beck literally wrote the book on TDD.

In this podcast Beck highlights the accountability aspect of TDD, and it resonated big time for me. I was also encouraged by his comments on his own difficulties writing tests being due to “not being a good enough designer. Yet.” I think that stance/insight would help more developers move into TDD.

This is reflections on, not an introduction to, TDD — for that, I don’t know a better treatment than his short, participatory text. I think it’s hard to really get it until you intentionally write that stupid little hardcoded implementation that you’re going to change in a minute … just after you write the next test.

Here’s a great post from Cory about open standards and Windows media player, including an exchange with a Microsoft apologist, for those (like me) who only have a passing knowledge of the issues. Norway’s public service broadcaster has launched a video service that is Windows media specific; now there is a debate about open alternatives.

The latest Economist Technology Quarterly (free access for the moment) has a brief status on video search. Searching the image itself is very difficult, but there is a lot of activity in searching associated text: the closed captions, the audio portion (via speech recognition), and human or machine produced video metadata.

IBM has a test version of a more sophisticated analysis/retrieval engine called Marvel; after manually tagging 1-5% of a set of video content, the system learns to recognize the rest — this is a huge reduction of the expensive, error-prone human tagging effort. IBM’s web has good detail on the project. From those pages I learned about MPEG-7, which is a video metadata (rather than encoding) standard.

The ETQ acknowledges that business models are lacking, but singles out Critical Mention as one that is working; they offer web-based search and alert (”reputation management”) services for TV news. I see in the news last week that they now have a licensing agreement with AP (Associated Press) Digital.

Since it looks like metadata is playing a big role in video search, it should be interesting to see which producers/consumers are doing the tagging, and where the analysis and search logic resides. The big search engines are an obvious home, fancy services like CM are another, but why shouldn’t I also have something to find stuff on my computer or LAN?

France was late to the internet, partly due to an already established online services network called Minitel. But lately it seems they’ve become quite a leader, at least in high-bandwidth offerings. My DSL provider’s plan is 30€/month and includes a connection of up to 20Mbit (in practice I get about 10Mbit), a VoIP solution that has free unlimited calls in France and is about 1.80€/hour to California, and >200 TV channels (>80 free, including the new digital-over-airwaves channels). The satellite content providers are now delivering over DSL too. Stability and service are not rock-solid — and they’ve been downright nightmarish for some — but I’ve had a pretty good experience overall. Connection-only, high-bandwidth (20Mbit) offerings are about 15€/month, from multiple providers.

My provider has been aggressive with new services, and I especially like this free one; it’s based on the free and open-source (GNU GPL) VLC media player project, and means I can stream video from any computer on my LAN (Mac and PCs for me, but most OSes are supported) to my TV without any additional hardware. No computer in the living room. DVDs, mpgs, etc all presented as playlists which can be selected with the TV remote. Well, any multimedia can be streamed, but video is the interesting one for me.

A friend just asked in jabber what I am up to, and I said “I’m reading a history of wikipedia.” The project started in 2001, and already

the nonprofit venture is the largest encyclopedia on the planet. Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica’s 80,000 and Encarta’s 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors. Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million.

(via robotwisdom; seeing Jorn Barger filtering links again after a year and a half away is the best thing that’s happened to me today)

(more…)

Andrew Orlowski at the register has an article about David Rosenthal’s LOCKSS (lots of copies keeps stuff safe) project. It’s big with libraries who are very familiar with, and concerned about, how to keep digital stuff around for a long time. “LOCKSS is both a web cache and a web crawler,” and addresses persistence (even in the face of attempts to remove or damage); it doesn’t address obsolescence nor proprietary formats.

From the LOCKSS homepage:

Libraries haven’t had an easy way to build digital collections, nor had any assurance that a digital collection - once obtained - would remain accessible to future generations. Publishers are being asked to assure persistent access to content - a function well outside of their core mission. The LOCKSS Program addresses these issues.

and:

Simply put, LOCKSS provides for Jefferson’s “multiplication of copies,” but with an electronic twist.

Is it good for us too? “Rosenthal said he would expect it to be several years before it filtered down to the DIY level.”