Monthly Archives: October 2005
ROKR review
“We all want an iPod phone that will play any song, anytime, anywhere. Just four little problems: the cell carriers, the record labels, the handset makers and Apple itself.”
A great quote from a pretty good article about problems with the motorola ROKR.
—update—
The nokia N91 looks like the answer. This seems like it’s everything the ROKR should have been. But how long until it ships in Canada!
Bar Camp Amsterdam
Well, I’m back in Vancouver now and Amsterdam is already a distant memory, buried under piles of email in the in box.
Bar Camp Amsterdam was a huge success, and I’ve never been to a conference where I learned so much. I especially loved learning more about Jabber, and seeing RalphM’s cool map with Jabber presence integration. Hey, those jabber folks even have a spec for transmitting audio information! I wonder how I can use that.
The open ended and ‘participant driven’ conference schedule meshed perfectly with everyone’s desire to share and learn. Instead of a single presenter speaking to passive listeners, everyone was an active participant. And Boris cooked some great meals.
Photos are available (of course).
Drupal Con 2005
Just finishing up at DrupalCon in Amsterdam. I’ve had an amazing time and the energy here is great.
We’ve had talks from Rasmus Lerdorf (the originator of the PHP project) and David Axmark one of the founders of MySQL. I felt honored to have both the ‘M’ and ‘P’ portions of ‘LAMP’ so well represented at our humble Drupal conference. Highlights included Rasmus scanning drupal.org for XSS vulnerabilities and finding a few (although we did all right in the end).
I also enjoyed the talk from the Joomla guys. Nice job! Some of the things discussed was the sharing of a template system between the drupal and Joomla projects and a shared authentication system. Interesting to see if this could be worked out.
Also interesting was Adrian Rossouw’s talk about simplifying the themeing process for users. I really like the idea of having color pickers and being able to import header images from flickr.
Next up, Bar Camp Amsterdam!
Podcasting is just distribution of content
The always interesting Lucas Gonze says:
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen opines: I don’t get why podcasts are distributed as one big file. I would much rather have the shows broken up into smaller pieces which I could synch to my iPod. That would make it much easier to find a given section again later (if I want to quote it) and it would make it easier to stop the podcast and pick up where I left off later. It can’t be hard to do technically — it would be the same as having an album. Each podcast would just be an album in iTunes.
Answer: because Adam Curry had radio on the brain during his early experiments with the thing that came to be called podcasting, and after that thing took off it was too late to change. The movement defined itself as stuff like the stuff that guy does.
I think it will change though. I think that as the public perception of ‘what podcasting is’ shifts from a radio analogy to simply a method to get online content to end users, “good things” will start to happen. Being able to subscribe to your favorite artists in iTunes for example, and having new music place directly onto your mp3 player. This is a new form of audio distribution technology (the whole ’subscription’ thing, being the main differentiating factor), and is much more important then simply a way for amateur radio announcers to put poorly recorded talk shows online (Although that’s cool too).
Upcoming news
Last week, I went to see Sigur Ros with Richard. Like a good Web2.0 denizen, I dutifully marked down that I was attending this event at social calendaring site upcoming.org. I saw that Richard was already there, and was the only other user attending this event. The day of the concert, I thought I would give a quick look to see who else had marked themselves as attending, and was surprised to still see only myself and Richard listed as attending. “Hmmm”, I thought to myself. “Maybe the audience will be composed solely of myself and Richard”. As nice as a private concert would have been, the show was completely sold out, packed with hip youngsters. The lucrative and broad ranging demographic of “Internet Users” was well represented.
So why then had nobody registered on Upcoming? I admit I wasn’t expecting a lot of people to have registered, perhaps 10, maybe 20 out of the roughly 2800 people in attendence. But to see just myself and Richard listed was a bit of a ‘tech let down’ (no offence to Richard, of course). Does no one know about this neat service? Does no one (except for a few fringe early adopters like Richard and myself) care? Is the web2.0 community as a whole doing enough to educate and promote their software applications to the masses?
We’ve come a long way since hotmail and I’m anxious to see more of the worthwhile tools available today being adopted by the non-geek populace.
Although… I have just found out that Yahoo has purchased Upcoming.org, so perhaps bus shelter adds and billboards with the Upcoming logo are in the works as I write this. Mass adoption to follow shortly after.
Death Cab For Cutie
Just caught Death Cab For Cutie down at the Commodore, and it was a great show. Also really enjoyed the opening act “Youth Group” from Australia.
No surprises in the DCFC set really, just good solid playing. One (of many) highlights was the solo acoustic encore of “I will follow you into the dark”. Very well done. Another highlight that made me chuckle was when DCFC took to the stage, I overheard a girl behind me say, “Whoa! I didn’t know these guy’s were like… old…”.
If I were to offer any suggestions, I think it might make sense to tour with an additional ‘hired gun’ musician. With Ben Gibard and Chris Walla splitting keyboard and guitar duties, I would like to hear more of that “wall of sound” that I hear on DCFC albums and I think that is quite challenging to reproduce as a four piece.
Don’t get me wrong. The sound at the live show was “full” but in the immortal words of my good friend, “If less is more, just imagine how much more, more would be”…
The World Is Not Flat
Lee LeFever has just unleashed his new travel website, “The World Is Not Flat”. Lee and his wife are taking a year off to go on a trip around the world and are going to be making posts from the far corners of the globe. Thankfully, they now have a spiffy Bryght/Drupal/Raincity powered site to post to!
Lee says:
“When we started telling people about our plans for the trip, we found that people love to share their travel experiences. We would write what we could on a napkin or envelope and eventually lose those valuable tidbits.
So, we figured there must be a way to collect and organize similar travel experiences using a web site. We started looking for ways to have a travel blog that also enabled our friends to share their experiences with us on the Web. This was the original inspiration for TwinF.”
It’s great to see this finally take off, and users have already submitted some good travel suggestions. So sign up already, and submit your favorite travel destinations!
Of particular note, make sure to check out the cool Google maps integration with Drupal (Coded up by yours truly, of course!). I’m going to stick this Drupal google map code up in CVS sandbox soon, so if anyone wants to play with it, dive in.
Happy trails Lee!
Trouble Down South
I just read an interesting (and disturbing) article in the Guardian today. Most of the article is concerned with the ongoing court battle between creationism and evolution, and concludes with some startling statistics. For example:
“40 per cent of Americans believe God will eventually intervene in human affairs and bring about an end to life on Earth, according to a survey carried out in 2002. Of those believers, almost half thought this would occur in their lifetime with a return of Jesus from heaven.”
Other standout passages include:
Last week one of the plaintiffs testified that her 14-year-old daughter was being abused by fellow pupils at school because she believes in evolution. ‘My child has heard comments from other students: “Do you really think we came from monkeys?”,’ said Christy Rehm. The echoes of the first Victorian-era reaction to Darwin’s theories may seem surreal but it is a powerful political force. President Bush has even weighed in, saying he believes intelligent design should be taught as part of science. ‘I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,’ Bush said.
Yikes! Time for the flying spaghetti monster to rise!