The Blog
05 Apr 2005 This seems like an appropriate time to relaunch the UK Politics Club.
ps. would've been better with the link. Doh! [from: JB Ecademy] [ 05-Apr-05 3:55pm ] If you were buying a DVD player to go under the TV, you'd be crazy not to buy a Multi-region machine and they're readily available even from reputable mainstream stores in the UK like John Lewis.
But what if you buy a DVD player built into your laptop? Or you buy one of those neat little portable DVD players for the kids in the back of the car or to watch on the plane? My understanding is that you can't get these (ahem) modified for Multi-region. On most laptops, you get 5 chances to change the region encoding before it simply stops working completely. How about accessory DVD players for fitting in a desktop PC? Let's face it, this stuff sucks! Exactly why shouldn't I buy a DVD in the USA while on a business trip and play it on my machine at home back in the UK? Why shouldn't I go down to Forbidden Planet and buy some import Anime and expect it to work on my UK machine? Just Say No To DRM [from: JB Ecademy] [ 05-Apr-05 3:55pm ] 04 Apr 2005 NTL have started rolling out more speed upgrades but they've been fairly quiet about it. If you have NTL Cable broadband then go to http://www.ntlworld.com/data-feeds/editorial/microsites/tierMigration/ The old 750Kbps service has been boosted to 2Mbps for the same price. It looks like the upload speed has gone from 128Kbps to 200Kbps. Which is better but still a right pain. We used to get 512-128 so a factor of 4 between up and down. Now it's a factor of 10. I guess they're still trying to limit file sharing.
Note that there are usage limits. 2Mbps gets you 1GB per day and there's 3GB per month on their entry level 1Mb service. Which is not good. 1GB a day is fairly reasonable. And they haven't actually started enforcing it yet. Customers with the existing services or 2Mb & 3Mb (1GB per day) Ntl reserves the right to contact customers who regularly exceed their daily usage allowance, where such excessive use impacts the quality of service for other ntl broadband customers. But as we all start downloading episodes of Alias from the USA via BitTorrent it could get irksome. I understand why they do usage limits but I still don't have to like it. The throttle seems to be in the cable modem. What would be good is if the speed limits were controlled in the network. So you could have ethernet speeds on your local cable segment, 10Mpbs and upwards within NTL and 2Mbps for the wider internet. This would still help NTL keep down their peering costs, but let me share my entire machine with my friend up the road. Just an idea, although I don't expect it to happen. The Horizon Project :: View topic - ver 054 download link and instructions.
Video add on for Skype [from: del.icio.us] On Ecademy there's a club called Attention as a product. run by Ronald Wopereis. Over on the other side of the world, Steve Gilmor is involved in attention.xml. So Ronald sends me a Linkedin request to put them in touch. Except that the only way for me to do that is via Jason Calacanis. Now I don't Jason well, and I don't know Steve at all. And passing this request reflects on me and I don't think I want to become known to these sort of people as someone who blindly forwards LinkedIn requests.
Now since attention.xml has a wiki, probably has a mailing list, and Steve probably has contact details available on the web, it would make far more sense for Ronald to just call him direct like we always used to. I reckon this whole 6 degrees thing for deliberate networking is a load of old rubbish. It's an interesting statistical analysis but it's not actually useful. We all say "Could you introduce me to X": A-B-X. We sometimes say "Do you know anyone who could introduce me to X" A-B-C-X. but IRL we never say "Do you know someone who knows someone who could introduce me to X": A-B-C-D-X. The big problem with this and with higher orders is that C has no skin in the game and doesn't know A or X. They're just a postman. Now maybe you like being a postman and have built a reputation for being one. But most people don't like this and are uncomfortable with it. 30 Mar 2005 Scripting News: 3/30/2005
It's always fun watching my good friend Dave Winer develop an argument. It starts with a big contentious statement that is obviously missing the justification. In this case, this would be "The problem with the EFF psosition is that in order to remain consistent, they have had to say that copyright doesn't exist" This looks and smells like a traditional usenet troll. So rather than dive in and flame Dave unmercifully, I've become used to waiting for him to get to the point and elaborate a little. So today we get a pair of test cases ad absurdam. Both involve taking content from the EFF and Cory Doctorow and suggesting... I'd add links to their content, and see if they object. If that isn't a problem, I'll start changing the words, and see if that works for them. Then I'll put my name on their work, I imagine that would be okay too. Why not? I'm just being creative! Then I'll change their positions to be more in tune with the entertainment industry. Somewhere in there, there's got to be a line. So I thought I'd check the licenses on each. The main page of the EFF has an "Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0" license. So Dave is not just allowed but encouraged to produce derivative works of their content. Just as long as he provides attribution and doesn't attempt to sell it. So the only problem with his suggestion is "Then I'll put my name on their work". And this is only a problem if and only if he removes their's. Cory's Eastern Standard Tribe is licensed with Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 This again is completely clear and it's completely clear that every suggestion Dave makes is completely against Cory's wishes. In fact, Cory goes to pains to spell out what this means well beyond the Creative Commons license. Now hidden away in these two posts is an inkling of what might be happening and what the real issue is. "add links to their content", "Cory". So really, I think this is about Dave's dislike for Google's Auto-Link toolbar and Cory's noisy defence of it. Over time I expect this to rise to the surface and for a real argument to emerge. So rather than argue about whether the EFF want to destroy copyright or not (I think they don't), let's go back to arguing about what happens when you put text on the web in plain old html. My position is that the moment you do that all bets are off. You may want to have it seen in only one style, but by the time I've changed all the proper nouns to wikipedia links, all ISBNs to amazon links, changed the style sheet, used a different browser, blocked all the ads, taken the result and scraped it into RSS so that I can read it offline on my ipod it will be completely unrecognizable[1]. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it. If you really don't like that then lock it up in PDF at which point I'll simply stop reading you. But even when I've said all that, why were MS Smart tags evil and Google's auto-link not? Is it just that a few years have past and we understand a bit better what's possible and what isn't? Dave keeps talking about a line as though there is some qualitative difference between adding a link and changing a style sheet for accessibility. I keep seeing quantitative changes in bits sitting in someone else's computer and little more. But then I don't have the reverence for the written word and free speech that Americans seem to have. I prefer the situationists, post modernists and detourne. Derivative works? Hell yes! Tag it, photocopy it, spray paint it and slap it with glue on the side of the Bastille. [1] Yesterday had a great example of this. Start with del.ico.us, view it in Firefox, add the greasemonkey extension, add some custom javascript accessing del.icio.us web services. And what you get is auto-suggest layered on top of the form that Josh wrote. ps. To any #joiito denizens reading this, I apologise unreservedly for invoking He Who Shall Not Be Named. I'll just have to blame the Imp of the Perverse sitting on my shoulder and whispering in my ear. [delicious-discuss] big news
del.icio.us gets funding, Josh goes full time. WOOT! But how will it ever make money? Del.Icio.Us Auto-Complete - John Resig
Really rather cool example of using firefox, greasemonkey user extension javascript and some cool code to make the del.ico.us posting interface auto-suggest tags. [from: del.icio.us] How Not To Blog - RSS + Email. The Next Stage in Messaging
See also http://hownottoblog.com/index.php/2005/03/26/rss_aamp_the_evolution_of_online_chat. There's something here but I'm not sue what it is. [from: del.icio.us] Radio DavidByrne.com
What we need is not randomness, or recommendation systems, but better DJs [from: del.icio.us] 29 Mar 2005 I keep thinking about Last.FM's radio player and it's three button "Love, Skip, Ban" control. I want to put these buttons all over the place because they look to me like the bare minimum UI to build a rating system. So how about:-
- A Firefox status bar extension to the last.fm radio that makes these buttons always available - The three buttons on Google AdSense displays so that the publisher can express preferences for particular ads. - Put the buttons on a TV remote and link them to Tivo. Which then got me thinking about Amazon and their recommendation system. To make it work, you have to go through and manually rate items you already have. But I only have a 3 state reaction to a lot of things, not a 5 way grade. I love it, it's OK or I never want to hear/see it again. 26 Mar 2005 Big Champagne track P2P downloads and produce a BillBoard-esque top 10. As you'd expect the top 10 mirrors CD shipments. It would be interesting to do some long tail analysis of their data.
Key questions:- - Total number of unique files in a week - Total number of files that are of music that has been deleted from the music Biz catalogues or are just not in commercial catalogues and so are unavailable anywhere else. - Total number of files that are unavailable on commercial downloading sites like iTMS, etc. I'm sure you could think of more. I went to San Diego last week and while I was out there bought a Fujitsu 80Gb 5400rpm drive for the laptop. I also got a USB2 laptop drive enclosure. So over the last 24 hours I've been swapping and upgrading disks across 3 laptops. Just to recap, I was starting with a recent Toshiba laptop with a 30Gb disk configured as FAT32. The disk was pretty much full with about 1.5Gb free.
I started with my own laptop. The new drive goes into the enclosure and is connected via USB. I opted to start with Norton Ghost. Two nightly attempts at this failed with a memory error after a good 5 hours of running. Not good. It seems that Ghost does a pretty good job of copying volumes across as long as you don't take the option to extend the partition to use the extra space. So what I finally did was use Ghost to copy the main volume into completely unallocated space on the new drive and not attempt to extend it. I then swapped the drives so the new one is in the laptop. Then I ran convert.exe to change it from FAT32 to NTFS. The final trick to extend the partition across all the available space was to boot the machine from a Knoppix CD and use QTParted to adjust the partition. It may seem strange to use Linux to modify a Windows machine, but I didn't want to buy Norton Partition Manager as well as Ghost. In retrospect, there probably is a way to use Linux utilities to do the initial copy but QTParted doesn't do partition copies and Partition Manager on Knoppix is a command line utility and not at all obvious. And I haven't got my head fully around using Knoppix and windows/samba networks. So then it's on to my son's Fujitsu Lifebook which apparently has a 20gb disk. Firing up Computer Management, Disk Management, I was amazed to see that it had actually had a 60Gb disk and the person who installed XP had partitioned it as 20Gb NTFS and 40Gb of unallocated space. duh! Again, 10 minutes of booting into Knoppix and QTParted had a single 60Gb partition. Result! The third machine is a quite old Dell Inspiron 4000. This has a 20Gb disk and out of all the work above, I had a spare 30Gb in the USB enclosure from my machine. Unfortunately as well as being quite slow, the Dell only had a single USB1.1 port. Trying to do volume copies across this was going to take half a day. So this time I used the network. Ghost did a backup across the network to space on my main laptop. I then used Ghost to restore this (without changing the partition size) onto the USB enclosure using my main laptop. Now I've got a 20Gb bootable disk with 10Gb spare. Next, swap the disk with the Dell. Convert to NTFS. Finally, boot the dell into Knoppix and adjust the 20Gb partition to 30Gb. Finally, I've got the Dell's 20Gb disk in the USB enclosure so that gets cleaned and reformatted and can be used for backups or portable storage. So here's some lessons in all this. - 2.5" HD USB2 enclosures are cheap and damn useful. In the UK they are about £20 ($20 in the USA) - 2.5" 5400rpm laptop drives are now pretty cheap (< £100, < $150) and available in up to 80Gb sizes. 100Gb drives are just appearing but all seem to be 4800rpm. - Norton Ghost will do volume copies from one disk to another or from the internal boot disk to a USB disk but seems to have problems with adjusting partition sizes afterwards. - This may be because adjusting a FAT32 partition seems to involve moving and adjusting every file, whereas adjusting an NTFS partition only involves changing the partition table (as long as the partition doesn't move). - So, if you're on FAT32, switch to NTFS as early as possible. - If you get a new machine with Win XP installed, don't just assume the disk has been partitioned properly. At least have a look! - Knoppix is an incredibly powerful rescue CD for Windows machines. It's free. You've got to find you're way round a whole new OS. But it's ways of doing things are not totally alien. And the utilities included are really powerful. I'm sure there's a way of doing partition copies across disks but I haven't worked it out yet. Assuming that's possible there's really no point in buying Ghost for this task. Though you may still want Ghost for it's backup abilities. - Make sure you've always got a good copy of whatever you're doing before doing anything that could potentially destroy all your work. - If you're not comfortable with hacking around like this, don't even start. Take the laptop and new drive to a shop and pay them to do it. I think I end up where I was when I started this. I'm somewhat surprised and disappointed that XP doesn't have the tools built in to do these sort of tasks. Pretty much anything you do with Fdisk or Disk management is destructive and you lose data. There's no utility to copy partitions. And backup (at least in XP Home) is pretty limited. 24 Mar 2005 Delicious Linkbacks
How very neat. Go to a web page, hit the bookmarklet and get a list of the del.icio.us pointers to it. [from: del.icio.us] Yahoo! Search for Creative Commons licensed content. You can search for content that is free for commercial use and/or where you are free to produce derivative works.
New set of Search APIs so you can develop programs that interact with Yahoo's search. Blogging and social networking. Acquires Flickr. for photo sharing and publishing. Upgrades mail service to 1Gb Introduces a virtual market for ideas Yahoo Buzz is a notional market where you can track, buy and sell, and create futures in notional ideas with notional money. Tech Buzz is the same thing for technical products and services. If it wasn't that Google search and news were still better than Yahoo's, I'd go long on Yahoo and short on Google. And then there's all those really annoying ads on Yahoo. [from: JB Ecademy] Tom Coates has another big idea. plasticbag.org | weblog | Social Software for Set-Top boxes...
This is TV meets last.fm 23 Mar 2005 19 Mar 2005 When I was at school, we did a business game course to try and get us to understand what manufacturing was all about. My group decided we were going to liquidate everything and go out of business. So in the last 3 rounds we stopped manufacturing anything. Our production costs went to zero, our warehousing costs wound down, while income remained the same. We didn't win but we came second for money in the bank.
So what happens when the Music biz realises they are screwed and decides to go out in a blaze of glory and with money in the bank? The plan (as explained here before) is to digitise everything they've got in the archives that is mastered or at least in more or less final form. Put it all up on an AllofMp3.com style site where you can download it in your choice of encoding and with no DRM. Set the price at around 5 cents a song. And go for broke. See if they can get at least 1 billion downloads in a year. this would bring in huge amounts of money but it would also as a side effect flood the P2P networks with high quality, properly tagged MP3s with no DRM. So they'd be using their entire history as seed capital for whatever the next big idea is and in the process take down the whole current distribution chain of hardware CDs. Isn't a supernova better than going out with a whimper? 18 Mar 2005 Had an idea last night for a web site called ThisSucks or NoClothes or such like. It would be for people to expose the emperor with no clothes. To be able to open the window and shout "I don't care what everyone else says, This Sucks".
The plan is for people to post to del.icio.us with the tag ThisSucks/their_tag. The site would then pick these up and republish them via RSS and probably via a lazyweb style trackback as well. I'm probably not going to do this, but maybe by the power of lazyweb somebody else will. And here's my first. Google Adsense Sucks for Bloggers! 
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