The Blog
27 Mar 2006 With a nod to Cory who suggested the byline.
 And to the Wikipedia entry. Please steal this image and use wherever and whenever you like. Rip it, Mix it, Burn it. 26 Mar 2006  DRM is artificial scarcity that steals fair use rights from customers and the public commons. That's Corporate Piracy. Please steal this image and do whatever you like with it. ps. This message still isn't right. "It's Piracy" isn't quite the right message and like Lessig's Right to Remix the underlying message is too esoteric. We need a soundbite as catchy and obvious as "It's Piracy". And people aren't going to get "It Steals Fair Use Rights" either. How about this one.  Publishers Public Domain Piano rolls Short Copyright Terms Photocopiers Home Taping (Lack of) Copyright Term Parity Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act VCRs CD Burning P2P File Sharing DVD rewriters Time Shifting Kazaa Sony VCR Ruling Video Cameras Camera Phones Internet Radio Sampling Mashups Counterfeit mass production Creative Commons Russian Download sites Countries with no respect for Copyright DRM DMCA The Broadcast Flag Fair Use / Fair Dealing First Sale Doctrine Corporate Lobbying Overly Restrictive EULAs Jack Valenti Organised Crime UK Performance Licenses Libraries Small Mammals Are Killing Film Entertainment The Entertainment Complex/Cartel Music Labels Dinosaur Business Models  And it's Illegal Making us all criminals Fun 16 Mar 2006 Configuring Apache for Maximum Performance | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials
[from: del.icio.us] 15 Mar 2006 08 Mar 2006 06 Mar 2006 05 Mar 2006 If you want to write Skype add ons with PHP, you need:-
- PHP5 - The Skype COM Control - Some sample code to get you started. 02 Mar 2006 iTunes' long march to market share | The Register :
"The iTunes Music Store [ITMS] buyer buys 25 songs in the first year, 15 in the second year, and in the third year, the battery has died, so you have to go out and buy a new iPod. And you paid $300 for that machine," Stupid, stupid, stupid. As a father of (still, just) teenage kids, It makes me really quite angry that a $300 device that should be a consumer durable is now a consumer disposable. It's one thing throwing away a $50 cassette player because it's broken, it's quite another throwing away a $300 device. "oh, well, never mind, I'll get another for my birthday" 01 Mar 2006 Australian IT - Napster plays blame game (Adam Pasick in New York, MARCH 01, 2006)
NAPSTER'S chief executive has blamed technical glitches from Microsoft and music player makers for hampering his company's ability to compete with Apple's iTunes music service. "There is no question that their execution has been less than brilliant over the last 12 months," Napster chairman and chief executive Chris Gorog said at a New York conference. "Our business does rely on Microsoft's digital rights management software and our business model also relies on Microsoft's ecosystem of device manufacturers," he said. Goven my experiences with Playsforsure after a Zen Xtra firmware upgrade, I'd agree. PlaysForSure doesn't. isbndb.com - free ISBN database
Wow! A library spider that has assembled a vast amount of information about books. [from: del.icio.us] 26 Feb 2006 25 Feb 2006 Official Google Base Blog: Buying on Google Base : For buyers, this feature will provide a convenient and secure way to purchase Google Base items by credit card. For sellers, this feature integrates transaction processing with Google Base item management.
Is this the beginning of Google's Paypal competitor and them muscling into eBay's space? 24 Feb 2006 With Songbird and rumours of a P2P extension for Firefox, is the Mozilla XUL environment destined to become a preferred route for cross platform desktop development?
How about a P2P IM+Voice+Video chat client built on top of LibJingle and using XUL? At least one person seems to be going in that direction. 23 Feb 2006 Yahoo! Developer Network - PHP Developer Center
A bunch of articles and scripts about using PHP with Web 2 APIs, mainly based on Yahoo!'s APIs [from: del.icio.us] 20 Feb 2006 On O'Reilly Radar > Tim O'Reilly says
From a consumer point of view, Apple's DRM is far worse, ultimately, since strong DRM just makes people give up on the product, or route around it, while Apple's is just comfortable enough for most people that they go along with it. Hence the effectiveness, to my mind, of Jeff's image. Which was "The key to protecting rights and getting paid is as simple as the difference in how dogs and cats are handled at the veterinarian. When trying to control a dog, you tighten your hold. When trying to control a cat, you loosen your hold. DRM, properly executed, is a cat. " Cory is unsurprisingly all over this. Here's my comment. DRM, properly executed, is a NoCat. There is no cat. As technical and business aware leaders we've really got to stop promoting the idea that there's an acceptable level of DRM. There really isn't. By praising Apple's DRM, we're promoting the idea that it's ok to sell customers a high priced, low quality, DRM-riddled product that only works on one vendor's platform. Is that what the customers were crying out for? The end result is that there isn't or won't be a single open music player that isn't tied to either FairPlay (sic) or PlaysForSure (even more sic). Is that really a good thing? Thinking further about this. There's a persistent meme in the blogs that there is something called "Acceptable DRM". I'm very strongly against this. My take is that DRM is never about preventing piracy and always about capturing and controlling market share while ensuring customer lock in. But I do wonder if there's a parallel here with the real reason for copyright. Just about everyone agrees that Copyright as a limited term monopoly for the creator is a good thing and should encourage creators by ensuring an ability to get a reasonable return for their efforts. This balances the immediate payback to the creator with the longer term payback for the commons. Even the most ardent copyfighters seem to agree with this. The problem is that copyright terms are out of control and there's a persistent belief among creators and their managers that they should have an indefinite monopoly on their creation. The parallel with DRM is to argue that DRM gives innovators (like Apple) the ability to innovate and maintain a limited monopoly on their innovation and so make a reasonable return on their investment. But the strength of DRM and it's indefinite nature again distorts the balance with the good of the commons as a whole and specifically the good of the customers. Enshrining this monopoly in law with things like the DMCA legitimises this im-balance. In theory market forces should resolve this into a balance between the DRM owner and society. In practice, DRM re-inforces the existing market shape rather than allowing market forces to change it. Thus we have a self perpetuating cycle where Apple can create and maintain a monopoly on both legal downloads and the player to use them to the long term detriment of the customer. But all this is moot. Apple couldn't have done this without agreement with the entertainment cartel. They wouldn't have given permission without DRM. The DRM gives Apple a weapon to build and maintain market share. Other vendors are then locked out of the market. The whole exercise is protected by the DMCA. So no matter how much I say that buying a high priced, low quality, DRM-riddled product that only works on one vendor's platform is just plain stupid, very large numbers of people will still go ahead and do it because it's the only game in town. A comment on a post by Joho.
I had a long talk with Ross Mayfield (blog) about the intersection of Wikis and Tags. The Wiki people will tell you that they've already got tags because they've had wiki categories for some time. But perhaps inevitably they've take a Wiki approach to it. The goal is to get the community to converge on the one true tag set for a particular page. And the user interface (both for entering and tag navigation) is slightly awkward. What I think is missing is the del.icio.us/Flickr UI that makes it completely trivial to enter a set of space or comma separated tags and to navigate the tags once they're in there. This suggests that it was actually the UI that was revolutionary about those sites as much as the data structures. But there's also a deeper question here about the relationship between public pages (URIs), public shared tags and private tags. To see this problem expressed go and have a look at what Last.FM have done. Anyone can tag a Track, Album or Artist. There's then two ways of looking and searching. You can use all public tags or you can use just your own. The problem in a wiki (especially with anonymous posting) is handling the tension between the one true set of tags that the public have converged on for a page, the mess of tags applied by all editors and the set of tags you personally have applied. 19 Feb 2006 Here's a whole bunch of ideas for Skype API add-ons. Most of them fall in the category of "I wish this existed". Some might end up being commercial. Most are just geek fun and geek reputation builders.
I've been trying to get php to play with the Skype COM control. The problem is that it needs PHP5 and the COM support for responding to events seems flaky. Maybe Python or Perl would be easier but 'm not good enough on those platforms. I've done the ground work to do some of this stuff in Delphi, but it's web support for linking to web applications is not as good. Anyway do with it what you will. If you fancy a joint effort drop me a line at julian_bond at voidstar.com Skype Desktop and Web Development --------------------------------- - A Bot architecture that can be extended to provide utility functions to Skype group chat participants. This would either be running on a participants machine or would run on a dummy Skype account running on a dedicated machine. Invite the account into the chat to get the facilities. - Group chat to Web archiving. Every message is echoed to a web page store. - Group Chat to Blog posting. ?blog Text. Would post Text to a pre-specified group blog. - Group Chat to del.icio.us posting. ?delicious URL Tags [Text] would post a bookmark for URL to del.icio.us - Auto TinyURL to URLs mentioned in chat. Any URLs mentioned in the chat over a minimum length would be converted into a tinyurl - Karma server. Any word of the form myWord++ or myWord-- would increment or decrement a karma store for that word. ?karma myWord would retrieve the current value - Get top three results for searches in - Amazon - Technorati - del.icio.us eg ?google ecademy returns the top 3 results for ecademy - Description server. A bunch of commands to define a text description of XXX eg ?def XXX is really stupid. ?XXX would return "XXX is really stupid" - Heralding. When somebody joins a chat, grab a description from the description server or from their profile and sends "SkypeName is blah, blah, blah" - Copy Jibot on IRC Here's Jibot's help. Dictionary and user info: ?learn concept is definition || ?whois concept || ?whatis concept ||?forget concept is definition || ?forgetme Technorati: ?info blog.com || ?last blog.com || ?cosmos blog.com || ?blogrep keywords Amazon: ?amazon words || ?asin ASIN || ?isbn ISBN Google: ?google words Karma: nick++ || nick-- || ?karma nick || ?karma - An app that let you control remote Apps such as a Shoutcast (internet radio) server. Send a chat message to the app and it would return status or make a status change of the attached app. - An Add-on that paused and restarted *all* music players such as iTunes instead of just winamp on incoming and outgoing voice calls. - An Add-on to get what you're currently listening to in all major music players and use it to update your mood. - An Add-on to switch Skype to mono, single channel so that the voice call was more like a phone in one ear when wearing stereo headphones. - A Firefox sidebar that replicated the Skype UI. - An Add on that implemented the missing NetMeeting functionality piggybacked on Skype's comms. eg whiteboard, desktop sharing. - A file sharing app that lets you browse shared directories on the target machine and then download a file or folder. Think Soulseek meets Skype encrypted file transfers. - An app that can stitch together two or more group chats to get round the 50 participant limit. - Automatic GPS and/or IP-Geo translation+Skype Presence to Google Map See http://www.gatagata.jp/SKSweets/ja/map_ww.html - Stalk. An App to watch a specific person and to then alert you when they came online. - An App and web site to enable a professional to charge by the minute for time spent providing their service via Skype, Skype-In and Skype-Out - A distributed call centre where call centre operators worked at home via Skype, Skype-in and Skype-out. 
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