October 2003 Archives

Yesterday I gave a presentation on the state of calendaring software at our institution. I titled the presentation "Peering Through The Mist" because I think the view is anything but clear - what we really want are some widely supported interoperable standards, and that's exactly what we don't have in the calendaring space right now.

Though he doesn't get written up in the trade rags, my colleague Terry Gray has been one of the true heroes of Internet engineering for many years, and when Terry speaks you can always expect well-reasoned deep thinking about the evolution of technology.

Yesterday Terry gave a wonderful but totally depressing talk titled "The new state of the network - how security issues are reshaping our world" (truth in advertising - I suggested the title to him).

Terry recapped how the basic tenet of designing the Internet was always to place the least impedance possible to the flow of packets from one end point to another, and to assume that all other details will be handled at the edges in the computers at the ends.

But now, driven largely by the huge failures of Microsoft to provide security at those very end points, we are being forced to put up devices to specifically get in the way of that free flow of packets - firewalls, private address routers, etc. And then we end up inventing new ways of getting packets to flow through those blocks (VPNs, for example).

Terry noted that while networking is about connection, security is about isolation, and that insecurity equals liability, and liability will trump innovation.

I hope we can have one hell of a wake...

After my WinXP laptop hard disk melted down this summer, I never got around to reinstalling MS Office on it. Most of my needs for editing can be met with a plain text editor (I use the freeware Crimson Editor on Windows), and I seldom actually need to use spreadsheets when I'm not at my office desk.

But I do have to create and give presentations, and I've been struggling with the best approaches. It seems to me that there ought to be an easy way to create standards-compliant html presentations, but I'll be darned if I've found it. I've created html presentations by hand editing them, but that's rather a pain.

The save-to-html in PowerPoint has actually gotten worse since Office 98 - it really wants to make presentations that only work in IE, and it seems impossible to get presentations on the web looking like I want.

Last week I downloaded and installed Open Office and was delighted to see an export to html option on the File menu in the Presentation software. But using proved another disappointment: it created two versions of my presentation, one which converted all of the slides into images, including the text, and one which contained nothing but text, rendering none of the images.

If anybody has any good html-based presentation authoring tools, please let me know!

misbehaving.net is an interesting new blog about women in technology:

"It's a celebration of women's contributions to computing; a place to spotlight women's contributions as well point out new opportunities and challenges for women in the computing field."

Looks like it will be well worth following. Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this out.

Computerworld has a good article on how many businesses are starting to offer wireless Internet access for free, as a competetive tactic to attract customers. Seems likely that this will be a growing trend, eventually leading towards ubiquitous wireless access around many cities and towns. Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this out in Boing Boing.

"Panera Bread Co., based in Richmond Heights, Mo., has also embraced free Wi-Fi as a marketing tool and plans to offer the service in 130 of its 600 bakery cafes by year's end, eventually extending the service chainwide. Ron Shaich, the company's chairman and CEO, says he views free Wi-Fi as an amenity that has already started to attract and retain customers at what he calls a "minimal cost."

In fact, Shaich considers free Wi-Fi to be such an essential marketing tool that he dismisses any discussion of ROI. "What is the ROI on a bathroom?" asked Shaich, pointing out that the day of pay restrooms in restaurants has long since passed. "

Am I the only one who finds that blinking ads on web pages completely overwhelms the content of the page? I went to read an online article in Computerworkd this morning and couldn't finish it, despite my interest in the subject. This particular page had ads that were constantly changing images on both sides and the top border....sheesh... I don't mind advertising, but puhleeez... at least keep 'em static!

I am not by any means a Unix geek, but I'm reading The Art of Unix Programming, by Eric Raymond. Eric wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which is one of those influential books I always meant to read.

This is a wonderful read, primarily about the design decisions and the philosphy that have made unix such an influential and widespread technology base that has lasted over thirty years. As Eric says:

"... the book doesn't focus so much on 'what' as on 'why', showing the connection between Unix philosophy and practice through case studies in widely available open-source software."

I love the fact that the book is available both on printed paper and online. The online version is free and made available under a Creative Commons license. I started reading it online, but am going to pick up the paper version to finish...hmmm, sounds suspiciously like a succesful business model...

I was struck by this passage, from the section Basics of the Unix Philosophy, expressed 25 years ago (!!) by Doug McIlroy, the inventor of Unix pipes and one of the founders of the Unix tradition:

(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

(iv) Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them.

Thinking more about individual file sharing versus online music stores, best epitomized by Apple's iTunes Music Store. Steve Jobs was quoted in a Wired News article as saying "We're going to fight illegal downloading by competing with it," said Jobs. "We're not going to sue it. We're not going to ignore it. We're going to compete with it."

My experience using the p2p file sharing services is that they are usually far from satisfactory as a strict consumer experience, all questions of legality and morality aside. Even when you find something you want, the encoding is likely to be poor and full of bleeps and burps ("artifacts"), the transfer speed connection to the peer is usually poor at best, the peer may disconnect or become unreachable before your transfer is over...and when you finally get the file, it may be something entirely different than what it was labelled - my favorite example of this was getting what claimed to be a version of Bye Bye Blackbird by Ray Charles, and it turned out to be Joe Cocker singing that song! I'm sure Joe would be flattered by the mistake, but Brother Ray would most likely be gravely insulted! :)

It's good to remember that the p2p file sharing services and protocols grew up as a response to the legal pressure brought by the entertainment industry. Initially the first wave of online music file distribution was done by individuals making songs available via ftp sites. The evolution of p2p was a case of an evolutionary adaptation to unnatural social pressures. After all, it's not like blogging, where you're actively seeking the individual input and viewpoint of the peer you're getting the data from.

So who wouldn't rather have the songs they want available from large, fast, reliable online servers that are centralized and professionally managed, with high quality encoding and reliable metadata? Hmmmm....sounds a lot like what the Apple store is reaching for.

And I find myself increasingly going to the Apple store first when looking for music - though it's not as complete as I'd like to see it. But, as a working professional, I perhaps have a degree of disposable income that much of the file sharing audience does not - for me paying $10 for an album is frequently worth it for the reliability and speed of the service, though I think it is still a higher price than I'd really like to see. I think the eventual price point for this kind of service remains to be seen, especially if the real aim of the service is not to make money by itself, but in conjunction with selling hardware (see Thursday's post).

just ask a musician :)

In an article by Ina Fried in CNET news, Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller says "The iPod makes money. The iTunes Music Store doesn't."

Now it seems like Sony could use that business model too...doesn't it?

I got an automated note from our mail system admininstration today saying that my use of the IMAP server was excessive. Upon investigation it looks like I had bursts of hundreds of IMAP connections to the server within a couple of minutes.

It turns out that the OS X mail app likes to poll all of the folders on the server for the count of unread messages in each, and it makes a separate IMAP connection for each folder. That seems like mighty unsocial behavior, especially given that I have over 200 folders on our IMAP server, and I can't find any way in the preferences to override it.

I only care about unread messages in the handful of folders that actually receive incoming mail - my inbox, of course, and a few folders that receive server-filtered mail from some mailing lists I'm on.

Pine lets me specify certain folders as being "incoming" folders - it would be nice if the mail app had something like that and only checked the unread count in those.

I wonder if this gets fixed in the upcoming Panther version of mail?

Apple released Itunes for Windows today. I loaded it up on my Toshiba Portege 2000 laptop under Windows XP. Once I pointed it to where my music files were, it seems to work just fine.

One of the things I've been looking for is a way to play my m4u files that I've bought through the iTunes music store on my Windows laptop when I travel, and it looks like this will fill the bill. I transferred over one of those files, and then when I went to play it I got a message that this computer is not authorized to play that tune, and it asked for my iTunes music store password, and (I guess) went out and verified that and then played the song. So far, so good!

MP3 NewsWire has an interesting story by George Ziemann where he presents the step-by-step analogy between Thomas Edison's tactics in trying to keep a monopoly over the moving picture industry and the RIAA's tactics in attempting to preserve their monopoly on recorded music. Of course this brings up Santayana's famous quote about those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Clay Shirky has an interesting article about the ways in which file sharing software has evolved as a result of the pressures put on it by the RIAA and friends, and what steps that evolution might take next.

He makes the good point that this pressure has very little effect on the widespread availability of the most popular music, while making less popular music (where the artists could benefit the most from the exposure) not as available:

"Worse for the RIAA, the popularity of songs is wildly unequal. Some songs -- The Real Slim Shady, Come Away With Me -- exist on millions of hard drives around the world. As we've moved from more efficient systems like Napster to less efficient ones like Kazaa, it has become considerably harder to find bluegrass, folk, or madrigals, but not that much harder to find songs by Britney, 50 Cent, or John Mayer. And as with the shift from Napster to Kazaa, the shift from Kazaa to socially-bounded systems will have the least significant effect on the most popular music."

Can someone tell me why there's not a way to export my Mac OS X address book to an ldif file? This makes no sense to me at all.

I'm attending the Educause 2003 annual conference in Anaheim in November. This is a huge conference, with lots of interesting sessions over most of a week. Educause has provided a nice itinerary-builder on the Web for the conference, that allows you to browse the program and select the items you want to attend. You can then view your itinerary, or you can export your itinerary as an Icalendar format file.

Icalendar is the Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (RFC 2445), which is supposed to provide an interoperable format for calendar events (note that this is only one of a whole bunch of Internet specifications for calendaring).

So after building my itinerary for the conference, I thought I'd import it into my calendaring system. Here at UW Computing & Communications we use the product formerly known as Corporate Time, now known as Oracle Calendar. This product says it knows how to import Icalendar format files, so I saved the .ICS file to my desktop and told Oracle Cal to import all events in the file, and I get "No valid entries to import."

OK, I think to myself, maybe this is a peculiarity of the OS X version of the product, so I go off and try the same thing on the Windows version, with the exact same result (nice to know they're at least consistent!).

I then try importing the same file into Apple's iCal calendar - boom, zap, pow, it goes in no problem and lists all of the events.

Hmmm...has anybody out there actually succeeded in importing Icalendar files into Oracle Calendar?

First we had both the Red Sox and Cubs heading towards the World Series...
Then we get the Terminator as governor of California...
Yesterday I saw (thanks to the folks at boing boing that Thomas Pynchon is going to be on the Simpsons....
And now this, courtesy Steve Robinson, who wisely notes "just way too weird"...

I'll be a participant, along with Mitch Kapor and Chao Lam from OSAF and Jack McCredie from UC Berkeley, in a panel on the Chandler in higher education project during the Educause annual conference in beautiful downtown Anaheim. The panel is Friday, November 7 from 9:30 - 10:20 in room 210B of the Anaheim Convention Center. It should be an interesting way to spend an hour - if you're around, come by and say hi.

The 15th annual Earshot Jazz Festival runs here in Seattle from October 24 through November 15, and the lineup is nothing short of mindblowing. This has got to be one of the most interesting and wide-ranging jazz festivals in the world, including New York. This year shows that particularly catch my eye include:

• the always amazing Keith Jarrett trio with Gary Peacock and Jack De Johnette
• bassist Michael Henderson leading a band of fellow Miles Davis alums in a tribute to On The Corner, including Sonny Fortune, Badal Roy, and Ndugu Chancler
• the Dave Holland quintet
• Mavis Staples doing a gospel tribute to Mahalia Jackson, accompanied only by Hammond organ, with Seattle's very own Marc Seales opening with a solo piano set of gospel music
• Sudanese oud master Hamza El Din
• new jazz heroes The Bad Plus

This weekend Microsoft issued yet another security patch, this one fixing a hole in IE that was left unpatched with previous patches. One of the questions that I haven't seen answered anywhere yet is whether this hole only applies if you actually run IE as your default browser, or if, because of Microsoft's pernicious embedding of IE components around the operating system, you are vulnerable no matter which browser you prefer.

One of the myths I keep hearing perpetuated is that the reason Windows has been the target for so many attacks is because it is the dominant desktop operating system, and therefore offers the biggest bang for the buck for those looking to wreak havoc.

While there is undoubtedly some truth to the fact that it's a big target, the fact of the mattter is that Microsoft has repeatedly made very stupid technology decisions that leave their software more vulnerable than other operating systems.

Here is a good article by Scott Granneman in the Register giving an understandable view of why Windows software is less secure than Linux and Mac OS X. Note that Microsoft could choose to fix these problems, as has been repeatedly pointed out to them.

Last December, Ira Fuchs of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation invited a group of people from the member institutions of the Common Solutions Group to meet with Mitch Kapor to talk about the possible intersection of interest between our enterprise needs and the Chandler personal information manager that the Open Source Applications Foundation is developing.

That led to several months of intensive discussion which have culminated in the agreement to develop a version of Chandler, known as Westwood, specifically designed to meet the enterprise requirements for higher ed, under grants totalling $2.75 million from Mellon and the CSG institutions. I am nicely quoted in the announcement of the grants, and I'm pleased to say that I will be one of the people on the advisory board helping to coordinate this work. As the quote says:

"Having a freely distributable, open source PIM that will support relevant standard protocols and connect to our existing enterprise systems will be a tremendous help in our institution. The campus has been trying for years to find good solutions for integrating calendaring and messaging that can really be supported for hundreds of thousands of users in scalable and cost-effective ways. We look forward to working with the great OSAF staff to achieve these goals."

The 5-string bass arrived in fine condition just as advertised - I have to say that I've had good luck buying instruments over Ebay, which is always a nerve-wracking thing - what if it doesn't play as good as you imagine?

But in this case the Roscoe Beck 5-string plays and sounds really great. Fender did a really nice job in walking that fine line between spacing the strings far enough apart to work well for right hand fingerings and still be not too exhausting for the left hand to fret. Of course, keep in mind that I have really small hands for a bass player.

The variety of sounds is great, without offering an overwhelming set of options, which on some instruments I just find distracting.

So far I've only played it through my extremely vintage Ampeg B12 portaflex amp, with Jim playing acoustic guitar and Kurt playing brushes. I look forward to getting it cranked up through the Ashdown Bass Magnifier sometime soon :)