The Mandelbear's Musings

I spent much of last night and this morning cleaning up my directory tree, mostly building the working directories for the new albums and fixing up the build scripts to make them more generic. And the whole tree is mirrored up to dreamhost for offsite backups. So it probably shouldn't have been surprising that I was able to replace the tree for steve.savitzky.net, formerly ganked with rsync from thestarport.com/Steve_Savitzky/, with a simple symlink into the archive tree.

Dumb bear. How long did it take me to figure that out?

Eventually they'll want to diverge -- I have a lot more space on dreamhost than I do at rahul.net, so I can keep all my tracks up there for collaboration, but all I'll have to do on the dreamhost side is move a symlink.

Not my most productive day ever, I'm afraid, but I've gotten a few things done. Mainly, I've updated my personal business cards and my album mini-fliers, which were last printed before CC&S came out and so had the pre-order URL on them.

I took the opportunity to start copying things over to steve.savitzky.net, which will eventually become my main site, over on dreamhost.com. At the moment it's just a mirror of theStarport.com/Steve_Savitzky/, and there are a number of broken links. It's mostly useable, though. Hopefully I can get it totally up-to-date and functional by OVFF.

I also wasted some time partially disassembling the old panel PC I rescued from the discard pile at work. The plan was to see whether it could be silenced by replacing its noisy fans; the answer is a definite maybe. I couldn't get it apart far enough to replace the power supply fan, but I figured out how to disconnect it. Maybe I can add a large enough case fan to compensate for its absence. The CPU fan might be replaceable, but it might be better just to replace the heatsink with a fanless one.

Time for a bath, and then to bed.

Just like all things related to Microsoft's Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) strategy, Office Live Workspace is a patched together, too little, too late offering compared to Google Docs. Question for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: when will Microsoft deliver a SaaS offering that the channel can take advantage of that beats Google hands down?

I've already mentioned the concesrt, which I think (after listening to the recording this morning) nwent fairly well -- only two or three major flubs. Moving on to the panels.

I misremembered on Saturday -- I only had three panels. They originally had me down for moderating all of them, but I insisted on no more than one per day. Next tine I'll also remember to make sure I don't have anything that starts after 4pm. It's hard enough squeezing in dinner.

Saturday's panels were, in order, "Open Source" [unremarkable], "Are You Secure?" [which I moderated -- tips on securing your PC; also unremarkable], and "Blogging" [Yeah, I do that. The latest LJ kerfuffle got a mention].

The really fun one was yesterday's panel on DRM [which I moderated]. I also proved to be the panel's resident expert on DRM technology, which I guess isn't too surprising considering what I've been working on recently. [No, not DRM, but secure docunent transmission.] The discussion quickly shifted into the economics of free media distribution, since everybody in the room agreed that the proponents of DRM are fighting a rearguard action against the inevitable. Some interesting input from Scott Sigler, a panelist who's making a living off Creative Commons licensed books, and AJA in the audience.

The most interesting thing to me was the fact that many people who download free copies of a book or song go on to order everything by that artist/author. Shouldn't have been surprising -- I've done it myself. AJA is now thinking about selling boxed sets of Heather Alexander's CDs. I think my idea about selling unmixed Audacity projects as "super singles" interested him as well. That one panel was worth the whole con for me.

The other panel yesterday was the one on History of Filk. Unremarkable, and rather thinly attended.

I wasn't on any panels today, but enjoyed the one on songwriting. And I've been enjoying the concerts, of course. Kat and Kendra's was particularly impressive -- these are kids I've known since they were little; they've become young women with excellent voices. I'm looking forward to hearing more from them.

I missed the final concert yesterday, and will probably miss the last one tonight -- I have to take the Y.D. home at 10:30 so I can get her out of bed in time for summer school. Grumf. And then there's that little matter of our new garbage collection service, which requires us to have the bins out on the curb by 6am in the goddamn morning on Monday! What corrupt political appointee had that brilliant idea?

This article by Don Marti includes a useful list of tools for working offline -- without a net connection.

It's not just for working on airplanes -- we've all been in hotels with flaky or expensive connections. And it ties right in to what I've been saying about owning your own content.

In previous post I described the recent unpleasantness and suggested that I had the beginnings of an answer. This article gives a little more information, and notes that many are jumping ship to LJ clones like JournalFen and GreatestJournal. But I don't think that's the answer.

As I said before, we need to take back our content.

There are some details I haven't worked out -- I'd like to have a simple, complete out-of-the-box package, but all I have are pieces. Here are the basics, though, and a few tools to get you started:

You need a place on the web where you can host static web pages, preferably in a domain that you own and without anyone else's advertising. But your ISP will do to get started. You do not need to be able to run scripts or a database. If you have a DSL or cable connection you could even host it at home -- I think that's where we're heading, but we're not there yet.

You do that, if you want to, on your computer at home. A program like Blosxom or ikiwiki will let you format and organize your own web pages offline, and construct the RSS and HTML summary pages you need to make a proper blog. I'm working on a more geekish solution based on the Unix utility make. You don't really need either. Just make a subdirectory of your main web page called "blog", and make entries with paths like "/blog/2007/0530/2150.html" or maybe ".../2150/title.html".

In other words, every entry is either a web page or a directory (which lets you put any images the page uses together with the text). Now all you have to do is run a little script to generate the RSS and HTML summaries and upload any new pages to your public website using a program like rsync or a web-based version-control system like Subversion or git.

Now, here's the part that will require a little more hacking on my part: there needs to be a script that parses the page for tags, builds the tag indices, and cross-posts to LJ or some other blogging site -- or sites -- based on the tags. That way, you can use LJ as your comment aggregator. The other missing piece is the little script that screen-scrapes LJ's email comment notifications and puts them back into your working directory. (You could run your own comment CGI script, but it seems like a lot of hassle. I stole this idea from ohiblather, by the way -- she has multiple blogs elsewhere on the web, and posts pointers to them in her LJ, which is also where she directs most of the comments.)

That takes care of the mechanics of blogging. I like the way Blosxom and ikiwiki let you integrate blogs and comments seamlessly into a website that might have much more in it. There's no reason, for example, why you can't allow comments on every page, or make a "changeblog" out of your version-control changelog entries to point your readers to new or revised pages.

The next thing you need is a "friends" page. Probably the easiest thing to use for that is Planet, a simple feed aggregator that generates a web page. Check out their list of planet-powered sites. But you don't have to publish your friends page at all if you don't want to; you can keep it on your own computer at home. And you'd better not if it has private or friends-locked posts on it, like you might acquire by reading your LJ friends page.

The thing I really don't have a good handle on is the community-building aspect of LJ. The rest of the blogosphere does this using things like trackbacks, pings, and blogrolls. I suspect that the FOAF project may be a large part of the answer: you put a machine-readable profile on your home page, and let FOAF-aware search engines do the rest.

What I'm really advocating is a move away from centralized services controlled by faceless corporations, back to a world where everyone (oops! ETA: runs their own node in the peer-to-peer network that is the Internet. Remember that TCP/IP is a peer-to-peer protocol -- which machine is the client and which the server depends entirely on what they're doing at any given moment.)

While I've been writing this series of posts about the economic models involving non-scarce things like content and ideas, a key element of understanding the business models that come out of this is recognizing that a key, scarce component is access to the musician. Clive Thompson has written up a great article for the NY Times Magazines about how new musicians are discovering the two sides of this coin. Basically, they've learned that the internet and the ability to communicate with fans is a key element in allowing them to be successful in the first place. That is, it's that ability to go straight to the fans that allows them to have a music career at all. I particularly like the one musician who strategically tours by using his online presence to figure out if over 100 fans will show up at any particular venue -- and then will make plans to perform there. Nearly all of the musicians being profiled probably wouldn't be nearly as successful without their online presence, without promoting their music for free, without asking others to help them promote their music for them -- and without being around and being accessible to fans.

It's been a pretty productive couple of days. Most of my time at work was consumed by a day-and-a-half, ten-person hackathon on some experimental hardware. It's a fun little machine, running Debian Linux on ARM. People came up with some fascinating hacks, and I managed to record in stereo through the USB interface. We're going to have a blast with it, and hopefully get in some good research as well.

At home, I've set up the Makefile rules for putting together the "extras" for people who preorder the CD -- it will have the most-recent dumps of all the tracks, in mp3 and ogg, updated as often as I remember.

OK, that was exciting. If you pre-ordered, you should be getting email in a couple of days -- let's say the first week of February sometime -- pointing you at the list.

I've also, as I mentioned downwhen a couple of posts, been working on tracks; listening to a dump CD in the car and going after some easy fixes.

Or in this case, sick computer glorious quiet. My ageing desktop machine has been dying noisly for some time; this afternoon it finally started failing reliably in the middle of starting Firefox.

It still sounded a lot like a thermal problem, but after pulling the heatsink and applying new grease it still froze at roughly the same point. Could still be a RAM problem, but it was a lot simpler to pull the hard drive and install it in the 800MHz mini-ITX system.

Took about half an hour to install a more recent kernel and reconfigure X, but it works fine. And it's a hell of a lot quieter. (Also about half the speed, but I can live with that for a while.) And I need to upgrade the RAM -- it's presently only 256MB.

Meanwhile, I've been hacking away at the text for About Bleeding Time and the Makefile in my Songs directory.

This year, Time Magazine picks YOU as their person of the year. Mirror on the cover and everything. Right.

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

Here's some more from Reuters. Hard to tell whether this is because they really just noticed that the Internet is a communication and collaboration medium, or because they couldn't think of anyone who actually did something worthwhile this year.

Unfortunately, rather than record another take on "Guilty Pleasures", I ended up getting sucked in to another LJ design trainwreck, (more at the link) this one having to do with revisions to the "update journal" page. This is supposed to be the basic, last-resort, guaranteed-to-work way of updating your LJ. And they broke it. It's prettier now, but some features don't work if you don't have JavaScript enabled! I should know better than to get sucked in to one of these flamefests, but I seem to have been the first one to discover -- or at least to mention -- the Javascript problem. So I guess I've done something of value.

Looking at some of these designers' userpics you can see the problem: they're young. Inexperienced. Arrogant. They think they're hot stuff because they graduated from a program in "web design". Whee. They'll learn, eventually, but meanwhile they'll make life miserable for us old curmudgeons who don't count because we're not in LJ's target demographic.

I need to stop going off on these tangents, amusing though they are, and get some work done. Tomorrow: turn in my sales tax account application, and hack some more on TiddlyWiki. That, at least, will be fun.

At the show, I bought BLAM on a 256MB USB key, for $25. The key came loaded with the entire new album in MP3 form, a ton of live tracks, graphics, videos, ringtones, and basically everything else you could want -- and when I was done moving all that stuff to my laptop, I was left with a useful USB key, instead of a lump of CD plastic that I would have to lug around with me every time I moved, pay to stick in a storage locker, and never listen to again.

The USB key is part of the BNL political/technical/social picture. Recently, BNL front-man Steve Page founded an upstart association for Canadian musicians and labels that takes the radically sensible position that DRM sucks, fans shouldn't be sued, and musicians should work the the Internet, not against it.

Perhaps one way to think of it is that Second Life is similar to the early closed online services like Prodigy, AOL and Delphi. Eventually, they all were forced to move towards the open internet that no one controlled (some slower than others). An "open source" Second Life could certainly represent the internet in such a scenario, taking away the more limited situation of Second Life, and allowing for much more interesting social and economic experiments.

Iceweasel and Gnuzilla, the trademark-restriction-free versions of a well-known browser and browser suite, are now in Debian unstable. Downloadable tarballs are here.

(From this post in debian, which is also where I ganked the cute picture. The icon came from the Wikipedia article.)

But one theme stood out: Web-based apps and services have become serious business, and everyone’s scrambling to provide platforms to deliver them.

“This is a fundamental architectural shift,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt of the massive server farms necessitated by maturing Web development and delivery stacks. “The network is always going to be around; … the [local] disk will be optional.” He asserted that packaged applications can’t possibly compete against Web-based apps long-term because “the datacenter is running 7-by-24, it has to be better. It can’t break.”

Although it's not apparent from my last few journal entries, I have been doing a few other things besides mixing songs. (People waiting with bated breath for my album might be inclined to say, "too many other things", but it's my album and I can procrastinate if I want to.)

Yesterday we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which selkit had never seen. We also had roaringmouse, who had come down early for today's Baycon meeting. Good trip. There was some construction going on that effectively turned several streets into pedestrian walkways -- too bad they're not likely to stay that way. The aquarium itself has seen some changes, too.

The chaoswolf and selkit immediately headed off to the Outer Bay exhibit to see the new great white shark; the rest of us went to lunch. The sit-down restaurant in the acquarium is very good, and pretty reasonably priced -- came to $25/person. After lunch we split up; it's really good to have kids that are old enough to go off and explore on their own.

I, too, made my way over to the Outer Bay, but truth to tell I was more impressed by the tuna, several of which which outweighed the (admittedly juvenile) great white. Good thing, of course -- some of them still have scars that I assume they got from the previous g.w.s. specimen, which was big enough to cause trouble. One of the nice new touches was a series of little bronze sculptures -- there was an octopus tentacle on the frame around the giant octopus's tank, and several clusters of mussels near the shallow-water displays. Another new touch was a walkway around the surf exhibit, that actually puts you underneath the simulated waves. Nice effect.

Today the flower_cat and roaringmouse went off to the Baycon meeting, and I went out for a walk. Did some EQ and mixing for "Programmer's Alphabet", and took the various kids out on shopping trips. (Fry's for super_star_girl, Stevens Creek Surplus for the chaoswolf and selkit.)

After that, I crawled back into my hole and did a little toolbuilding. In this case it was a simple little program that stuffs the contents of a template file into another file by matching the first and last line of the template. In this case I wanted to use it to keep the song list up-to-date in album directories. (It will eventually have other uses as well, of course.) I've been fiddling with the song order (suggestions gratefully accepted, since I'm still not satisfied with it) and changing some of the song descriptions, so it's always in flux. I hate doing cut-and-paste updating -- that's what perl and make are for. Yeah, I could have done it a lot more simply with sed. But I'm lazy, and it was easier to steal a somewhat different program and hack it to fit.

Reading this post by tarkrai I found out about Conflikt, the new Seattle-area filk con scheduled for the end of January, 2008. It's far enough out that I can probably keep the weekend free, and it's a heck of a lot closer thatn GAFilk.

Turns out it's almost exactly 5 miles to get home after dropping the chaoswolf off at work. The trip takes about 25 minutes; roughly twice what it takes to get there via an almost-empty I280. Going back on the freeway would take about the same 25 minutes as surface streets, but with more stress and the added risk of an accident or other blockage at one of the two major interchanges along the way.

Israeli filker moshez showed up last night; unfortunately after most of the regulars had left and the kids gone to bed. We swapped some songs anyway. He's in the area this week installing software at a customer site.

Finally got Makefile and HEADER.html files into my Tracks directory and its Tracks/net/ subdirectory. They're a little rough; eventually more information will get into include files and most of the process of preparing a track working directory for upload will be automated.

BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- A federal district court judge ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. The ruling was issued in a case brought by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corp. (Northern District of California Case No. C 06-01802 MHP) The suit charges that Target's website ( http://www.target.com ) is inaccessible to the blind, and therefore violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act. Target asked the court to dismiss the action by arguing that no law requires Target to make its website accessible. The Court denied Target's motion to dismiss and held that the federal and state civil rights laws do apply to a website such as target.com.

WAWS FOX30 Online - Jacksonville - Man Robbed by Teen Girls, Thought He was Meeting MySpace Friend

A Jacksonville man says he was duped and robbed by two girls after attempting to meet with a woman he met on the internet.

The victim says he chatted online with a woman, known on her MySpace.com profile as “Natalia”, for two weeks before deciding to meet with her. He says her prfile showed sexy photos, and a blurb which said “just lookin’ for something fun”. That brief, friendly description was all he knew about her before they planned to meet.

That is when two girls who were 14 and 15-years-old, approached him saying they knew Natalia, the girl he thought he'd be meeting. They also said they knew where he worked at what car he drove.

[...]

"[One of the girls] took [a] gun out and put it to my head and told me to empty my pockets."

The girls didn't get much because the victim had forgotten his wallet. They let him go, unharmed, and he called police.

(from BoingBoing)

I've spent the last three days getting back into work after a delightful and musical Baycon. It's a slightly rough transition, but as I told my boss mr_kurt (also a fan) it's something of a vacation by comparison.

In any case, I spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and this morning preparing a slide presentation for the Patent Review Committee -- that's the group that meets every couple of months to decide which of our hare-brained ideas are worth throwing a large pile of lawyers and money at. I still don't know if this particular idea passed the test, but I'm feeling pretty good about it.

The other interesting feature of this presentation is that I did it in HTML instead of OpenOffice, using the HTML slidy package from the W3C's collection of slide show tools. It was distinctly rough around the edges; fortunately I'm a quick study. I may try S5 for the next one, but I definitely like being able to develop a presentation entirely in a text editor. On the flip side, Firefox seriously sucks as a presentation tool on the Mac -- there's no full-screen mode, so you can't cover up the menu bar and the dock. Luckily it didn't seem to matter.

I'm starting to give serious thought to using Javascript on the website, especially for highly-interactive stuff like setlist and playlist management. My current setlist-maker is a Perl script that works well enough, but only on a fast network inside the firewall.

You'll find it here. (Update: and the LJ feed at bernerslee. Thanks, johno.)

In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights.

Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn't demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship.

Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space. In the mean time, I have had the luxury of having a web site which I have write access, and I've used tools like Amaya and Nvu which allow direct editing of web pages. With these, I haven't felt the urge to blog with blogging tools. Effectively my blog has been the Design Issues series of technical articles.

Here's an article in Newsweek (from Debbie Ridpath Ohi, who gets a small mention in the antepenultimate paragraph) talking about the rise of self-publishing on the Web for musicians, artists, and writers. They don't mention software writers, but we've been doing it since before the web existed.

What's new is that the mainstream media are starting to notice, and it scares the heck out of them. For all the screams of "piracy!", what's really at stake here is their business model: nobody needs the big middlemen anymore, not for things like books and CDs. Big-budget items like movies, high-end computer games, and grand opera still need a producer to front a lot of cash, but even there the prime-time advertising and distribution are becoming less important. For every movie that makes it big on its first weekend there are many that might as well go straight to DVD. Some of them do, and that trend is only going to increase. Other big projects can be done collaboratively now. Look at Linux.

(I was going to have some clever conclusion here, but I've had so many interruptions over the last hour or so that my concentration is blown, and I need to get to the bank and then to work. More tomorrow, perhaps.)