The Blog
04 Apr 2006 I'm getting increasingly annoyed and frustrated by people who don't publish contact details. (Cue "angry old man" finger pointing!).
Specifically this is people who don't:- - Fill in their Skype profile - Use an Email signature - Put contact information on their websites So take 5 minutes now to go and improve this. 1) Upgrade your copy of Skype The latest release is Version: 2.0.0.97. Release date: March 16, 2006 2) Launch Skype and go to File, Edit My Profile. Fill it all in and upload a picture. Put in your Ecademy Profile as the web address. eg http://ecademy.com/account.php?id=999&xref=999 where 999 is your ecademy ID. 3) Set Skype to show your status online. Tools, Options, Privacy, "Allow my status to be shown on the web". Now Ecademy will show your (more or less) up to date status. 4) Do the same with any other Instant Message systems that you use. 5) Go into your email package and set a signature. Assuming you're using Outlook (Why?  ); Tools, Options, Mail Format, Signature Picker, New, You want to have a maximum of 5 lines. Something likefirst_name last_name Business address, town, county, postcode T:Business_Telephone M:Mobile_telephone http://your_website.com or http://ecademy.com/account.php?id=999&xref=999 (Optionally) skype:your.skype.name?chat 6) Contact your web developer and make sure that your website has contact details that are easy to find and up to date. 7) I'd strongly recommend setting Ecademy to show more information on your profile rather than less. I know people are concerned about privacy, I just don't understand it. I'd recommend filling in and making visible your phone, mobile, email and street address. Now people will actually be able to contact you when they need to. If they forget the address of your office before a meeting, they've just got to find one of your emails. If they can't find an email they can check on Skype. The same if they need to contact you by mobile phone. Ecademy users will be able to see if you're on line on Skype or don't want to be disturbed. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 04-Apr-06 1:55pm ] 03 Apr 2006 Wired News: Reasons to Love Open-Source DRM talks about Sun's idea of an open source, interoperable DRM.
I must be missing something here. Alice gives the encrypted text, keys and algorithm to Bob with the source to the algorithm implementation. Doesn't this make it even easier for Bob to give the plain text to Carol? And surely giving the algorithm to Bob makes it possible for Bob to write a program to give to David so that when Alice gives David the encrypted text and the keys, David can easily produce plain text directly rather than having to re-record (or whatever) the plain text output of the original algorithm. As Ed Felter wrote, DRM inevitably converges on Spyware because the only way to make it work is to obfuscate the process. If you hand out the algorithm and program, you encourage the production of hacked works that simply bypass it. 02 Apr 2006 Skype Journal: Skype 3.0 will be released on ... Friday 16th March 2007! : By pouring over the change logs for Skype for windows, I gathered these facts. First there was Skype release 0.9x (major revision 0), which went through 23 public versions, and the average number of days between releases was 15.0 days. Next was Skype release 1.x, which went through 25 public versions, and had an average of 18.4 days between releases. We're now at Skype release 2.0, which has so far gone through 7 public versions, with an average days between releases of 20.3 days. Clearly, Skype are slowing down!
Now compare this with releases from MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, Google. Or Firefox or most of the OSS packages. My guess is that the majors are now so wrapped up in bureaucracy, quality control and management sign off that they've effectively forgotten how to ship early and ship often. What they don't seem to realise is that it's the only way they're going to stop Skype. This does assume though that there's a constant stream of new features that can be added that is never ending. There will come a time when Skype simply has nothing more to add. The whole IM+VoIP arena will finally mature and converge on a single set of functions that everyone supports equally. but we're a long way from that yet. Remind me again how long it is since the Google LibJingle announcement. 6 months? Where are the 3rd party products that support it? When are they going to appear? And now reflect on IE6. We get a maintenance patch to IE about every month. And yet the core functionality hasn't changed in 4 years. I've just been struggling with implementing min-width and max-width in IE which still doesn't support this CSS tag. So why doesn't Microsoft roll out incremental enhancements that add support for things like this or fix the 1 pixel off bug as they go along and fix security problems? They've got the mechanism which is reasonably seamless. They've trained users to run updates once a month. Why does it take a whole major release to sort out the small annoyances? 30 Mar 2006 29 Mar 2006 Woot!
DRM is Killing Music The T-Shirt. As seen on Boing Boing. It looks like they ship worldwide. Source EPS artwork here and here. Please steal this, rip it mix it, burn it and spread the word. 28 Mar 2006 I'm getting a certain amount of push back from the Apple Fan Boys. Not surprising really.
I know I'm tilting at windmills. In my perfect world, Apple Fans wouldn't say "We love you Apple and everything you do". They'd say "We love the iPod. We love iTunes. We love iTMS. But Fairplay sucks, and as long as you use Fairplay we're not going to use iTMS. And by the way could you make it easier to listen to the tracks we buy from iTMS on all the other things we have that play digital music, like the car stereo, the home stereo, the DVD player, the Swiss army knife, etc etc" 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] 
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