October 2004 Archives

A bunch of us caught Michael Franti and Spearhead on Friday night. The band's multicultural deep grooves, heavily partaking of hiphop and reggae, while also making frequent references to the bedrock roots of blues and jazz, combined with Franti's activist politics (not to mention several Bass Ales) for a perfect breather from election anxiety. Though I could've done with a shorter acoustic solo segment...

Following up on my own bad experiences with Apple's copy protection schemes (I'm no longer going to call these technologies Digital Rights Management, the current IT industry euphemism that can only have been thought up by the same people who brought you Military Intelligence), comes a great rant in the Inquirer by Charlie Demerjian. He hits the nail squarely on the head:

The fundamental question is simply this. Why would a consumer want to buy something that has more restrictions and less functionality for more money than current solutions? I have asked this question to junior members of the companies to the very top CxOs, and from people on the street to fellow journalists. No-one can give me an answer.

The only answer is greed. They don't give a rat's ass about you, what you think, care or do, as long as they get your money. If you don't want to give them your money, they will take it, and make resistance a crime.

Venture capitalist Tim Oren has a more reasoned, but no less conclusive, take on it:

This week, as promised, OSAF released Chandler 0.4, the first experimentally usable version of the open source, cross platform PIM client.

While this is still a very early pre-release primarily of interest to software developers and other brave souls who don't mind living out on the edge, it's good to see a real desktop program that can send and receive email and synch calendars via WebDAV.

As the documentation says, I wouldn't trust it with my real data, but I got it working fine on a test account here, using the UW imap and smtp servers, and a webdav server I have an account on at UC Santa Cruz.

This is real progress!

Congratulations to Mitch, Chao, Lisa, Pieter, Katie, Heikki, Andi, Ted, Brian, and all the rest of the OSAF gang!

The other day Xeni Jardin mentioned my band's release of sheet music (along with audio files) using a Creative Commons license in the extremely popular Boing Boing weblog (I believe this to be the first use of CC licenses for the sheet music for original compositions).

The band's web site had been bubbling along at about 200 page requests a day. On Monday, the day we got mentioned in Boing Boing, we received 2,456 page requests! Aha! Finally, our hour of fame!

But by Tuesday we were back down to 648 requests. I guess we've had our fifteen minutes for now.

The Boing Boing post is here.

I've been thinking about buying an iPod for a long time...still haven't convinced myself to part with that much money.

Now Apple's got some new ones out - you can pay $100 extra to get a color screen on your 40 GB version, so you can display photos (doesn't seem that interesting to me, but I'm sure they'll sell a ton of 'em). Or you can spend $600 (!!!) for a 60 GB iPod with the color screen.

Or you can get the 20 GB iPod in a special U2 version.

I don't like U2. I've never liked U2. I don't hear anything compelling at all in their music, and I find their attitude insufferable. Sorry, all you millions of U2 fans out there - nothing personal - I just don't get it.

But I do like the black and red color combo on the U2 iPod - hey, Apple, can I get that version without the autographs on the back?

Alan from the Command Post gave a terrific talk to the AP Managing Editors about how blogs and the Internet are changing the business of gathering and disseminating news. Thanks to Tim Oren for pointing this out!

Your ability to choose when and how something is reported, and the timeline over which you can hold information as you make that choice, are more compressed every day. Anyone can spill the beans, and with the web and email, everyone has access to the beans.

Worth a read!

The other day I bought the Neville Brothers fine funky new album Walkin' in the Shadow of Life from the iTunes Music Store, putting it on my iMac at work to listen to while I worked.

That evening while at home, I wanted to finish listening to the album. So I mounted my work computer's disk onto my iMac at home and dragged and dropped the song files over into iTunes and happily listened away.

Yesterday morning I decided I'd burn the album onto a CD to listen to in the car on the way to work. Uh-oh. No dice.

iTunes reports "None of the items in this playlist can be burned to disc."

What's up with that?

The tunes burn fine from my work iMac - but not from home, on a machine that's authorized to play the tunes.

This, IMHO, sucks. No wonder people keep using the mp3 p2p file sharing services, as reported here in Wired, talking about a new study of p2p traffic done by folks at UC Riverside and the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis.

>"In general we observe that P2P activity has not diminished," says the study, which will be presented at IEEE Globecom 2004 next month. "On the contrary, P2P traffic represents a significant amount of internet traffic and is likely to continue to grow in the future, RIAA behavior notwithstanding."

Get with the program, Apple. Sheesh.

Is anybody besides me old enough to remember the old Warner Brothers Records Columbia Records ad campaign from the early '70s 1969 that had the tag line "The man can't bust our music"? That was the good old days.

Last week for my presentation on Chandler and the CSG at Educause 2004 I used Eric Meyer's S5 package instead of Powerpoint for the first time.

It worked like a charm!

In case you're wondering, S5 stands for the "simple standards-based slide show system", which simply explains what it is.

I love the fact that it's entirely web standards compliant, requiring nothing more than a browser to view the slides. And, even better, the same content can be viewed with multiple formatting applied - for instance, here are the slides, and here is the content in an outline view.

Eric's now released version 1.0 of S5, along with a primer on how to use it.

I recommend it highly - a big thanks to Eric for making this simple and elegant tool available.

Now I just have to figure out how to convert our organizational Powerpoint template into an S5 template.

There has been a bunch of talk on the calendaring standards lists about how to handle time zones, and sure enough, last week I ran into a real-world example that pointed out the issues (but not the answers) in maddening fashion.

The Educause 2004 conference web site has an Itinerary Builder where you can select which conference events to attend and build an personal itinerary. I did that, then exported the itinerary to an ical file, which I then imported into iCal on my PowerBook. So far it worked great all the events showed up at the right times.

I then synched the Powerbook with my Nokia cell phone, figuring I could then just keep track of where I needed to be next by checking my calendar on the cell phone as I wandered the conference.

But lo and behold, all the conference events showed up on the cell phone eight hours earlier than their scheduled times!

When I looked at the data that the Educause ical export put out, I noticed that it came through with no time zone information. iCal on the Mac didn't pay any attention to that and put it on my calendar as if it were local time. But the Nokia apparently decided that any event without a time zone must be taking place at that time in Greenwich Mean Time (UTC) and shifted the event times accordingly.

Aargh!

It seems like the theme, intentional or otherwise, of this conference is the increased visibility and progress on open source projects in higher ed.

Brad Wheeler from Indiana gave a heavily attended talk where he spoke about the process by which Indiana came to the conclusion that it's better in many (though not all) instances to collaborate with other like-minded institutions on developing software than to either purchase it from major vendors or build it themselves.

Dave Lambert from Georgetown spoke about the general software dilemma faced by higher ed institutions - where we can't afford to build all of our own applications but the vendors don't meet all our requirements so force us to either heavily modify code or build workarounds. He emerging consolidations and the depressed investment climate are causing new uncertainties in the commercial vendor space. He contrasted that with the strengths of open source projects. He did suggest that it's possible that higher ed needs a new organization to coordinate and provide a locus for fostering and sustaining the many open source projects in progress. He painted a nice picture of topics which clump together into something he calls Scholarly Information Systems, where he said that it makes sense for campuses to collaborate on projects.

I met in the afternoon with Brad Wheeler and Rob Lownden and some other folks to talk about the new Kuali project to build an open source Financial Information System. The core partners in this project at present are Indiana and the University of Hawaii. This project sounds like it's taking off, and it's one I predict we'll be hearing lots more about.

This morning I participated with Mitch Kapor, Jack McCredie and Lisa Dusseault on a panel about the Chandler Project. The significant news here is that Mitch actually gave a demo of the 0.4 release of the software! Huzzah! He managed to create a collection of calendar items, upload them to a WebDAV server, tell the client to share them with another user, communicate the sharing invitation by email, and (on the other client) receive the invitation and accept the items into the second client's calendar. That's progress! 0.4 is scheduled for public release next week.

I was lucky enough to be the convener for Keith Hazelton's talk on leveraging campus directories for authorization and group management. Keith did a terrific job of setting the background for the use of directories for group management - this is extremely important work and I think a lot of people could benefit from a look at Keith's slides.

James Duderstadt, former President of the University of Michigan, opened the conference on Wednesday with a talk about the impacts of social transformation and technology on higher education. He spoke mainly about the National Academies Forum on Information Technology and Research Universities, and their activities to engage the executive leadership of universities in discussions about how technology is changing the way students and researchers work, and the social relations of researchers and educators.

The National Academies have issued a report on the topic, titled Preparing for the Revolution: Information Technology and the Future of the Research University, available here.

Tonight was the opening reception for the Educause 2004 conference in the Exhibit Hall. Educause has gotten huge - something in the neighborhood of 6-8,000 people!

Is it just me, or do the exhibits at these trade shows seem completely off the mark? I wander around, wondering if there's anybody who can really talk to me about the things I want to know about product lines. I went by the Novell booth to see if I could talk to somebody about their upcoming desktop Linux product, but nobody at the booth knows anything about it. Then I went by Apple to see if anyone can talk to me about whether the WebDAV client in Tiger will be able to work over SSL and to find out more details about authentication in the Jabber server in Tiger server - but again, nobody at the booth knows details about that kind of stuff. Oh, well.

I had a nice time chatting calendaring with Debby Umbach, Ed Karish and Michael Harris from Meeting Maker. They are trying to understand the lay of the standards landscape. One thing we're all wondering is what's the state of RSS event standards. I talked up the CalDAV and Calsify efforts, and it sounds like they'll participate in future interop and CalSched consortium meetings.

And now to sleep, in order to make it to the 7 am speaker's breakfast tomorrow (ugh).

I wrote a couple of months ago about my colleague Sheryl Burgstahler and her DO-IT projects to help students with all kinds of disabilities work with computing.

Now Sheryl, along with Richard Ladner and Rajesh Rao of the Computer Science department and Melody Ivory-Ndiaye or the Information School have won a big new grant from National Science Foundation to find the best ways to represent in tactile form the graphical images found in scientific, engineering, and mathematical books and papers, as well as in digital formats, and to automate as much of this work as possible.

The project web site is here. Nice work!

Hoo-boy - this is depressing. I doubt whether the other states are doing any better.

From an article in the Sacramento Bee:

Nearly six months after giving the first statewide exam to identify students who aren't prepared for university-level course work, California State University officials found that nearly 80 percent of high school juniors they tested are not ready for college English.

The same test - called the Early Assessment Program - dealt better results in math, with 45 percent of participating juniors posting scores too low to prove they are ready for college-level math.

I'll be in Denver most of next week for Educause 2004.

I'm on a panel Thursday morning at 8:10 (ugh) with Mitch Kapor from OSAF and Jack McCredie from UC Berkeley talking about the collaboration between the Common Solutions Group and OSAF on the Westwood version of Chandler. Mitch is supposedly going to actually demonstrate the 0.4 version of Chandler (you read it here first), so come on Ballroom 4 by if you're at the conference and up that early.

Wednesday morning I'm the convener at a program on using LDAP directories for Authorization and Group Management featuring Keith Hazelton from the other UW - the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I think being a convener means I'm supposed to introduce the speaker and remind everyone to fill out the evaluation forms, which I myself rarely do. Keith is a smart guy, so this should be an interesting session. 10:30 in Room 201.

As usual at a conference with thousands of people, most of the interesting activity will be in hallway and private conversations with interesting folks. I'll try to blog from the conference as much as possible. If you're going to be there and want to get together, drop me an email or IM (on iChat or AIM as oren dot sreebny at mac.com) !

From today's NY Times:

The Food and Drug Administration has cleared the way for a Florida company to market implantable chips that would provide easy access to individual medical records.

The article is here.

I'd just like to point out this great rant by Halley Suitt about bed and breakfasts. Great fun reading.

In between fighting the war on terror and subpoenaing your library records, the good folks in the Justice Department are focusing on that hardened band of criminals - folks who trade files on the Internet.

From Declan McCullagh's CNET News.com coverage:

The U.S. Justice Department recommended a sweeping transformation of the nation's intellectual-property laws, saying peer-to-peer piracy is a "widespread" problem that can be addressed only through more spending, more FBI agents and more power for prosecutors.

"The department is prepared to build the strongest, most aggressive legal assault against intellectual-property crime in our nation's history," Attorney General John Ashcroft, who created the task force in March, said at a press conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon.

And the same friendly people in the entertainment industries are now asking for the Supreme Court to overturn the Grokster case - from Fred von Lohmann's absolutely essential article:

The entertainment industry today filed its petition for certiorari asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Ninth Circuit's ruling in MGM v. Grokster.

Second, the entertainment industry appears to think that it can treat the Supreme Court and Congress interchangeably in pushing for its preferred re-write of copyright law.

Doesn't our government have anything better to do? Shouldn't the entertainment industry spend more of its time working on quality artistic product or actually taking advantage of new distribution mechanisms to bring down prices? This is getting completely out of hand, in my opinion.

I've been browsing sites that take note of new technological toys. In particular, I'm waiting for the perfect phone/email/browser combo, I'm wondering if the Canon i80 is the right compact printer to buy for my family room, and I'm thinking I should have a digital camera to take to Vietnam in February that could use regular AA batteries in a pinch.

I've been using the rss feed from Gizmodo to try to keep up with what's coming out (an impossibe task), and I like that pretty well.

A couple of people have noted lately that there are a couple of sites covering technology specifically from a woman's angle (not that I am a woman, but it's an interesting twist) - these might be worth a look if you're interested in seeing whether women have a different take on gadgets:

Popgadget and Shiny Shiny. After a quick glance, I like Popgadget better - they seem a little more substantive, and don't cover things that seem just sort of silly to me, like LCD monitors that turn into handbags. Plus, Popgadget did cover the Octodog Frankfurter Converter, pictured here:

There is a great article over in Wired about Amy Smith, an mechanical engineering instructor at MIT who won a MacArthur award for her work using real-world (read old-school) technologies to help communities around the world, like helping people in Haiti make charcoal from agricultural waste rather than trees. Really inspiring!

I've been lucky enough over the past year and a bit to be collaborating with the Open Source Applications Foundation on the Chandler project. One of the real pleasures of this work (and there are lots of others) has been in getting to spend a little bit of time with Mitch Kapor, whose intelligence, insight, and general mensch-like qualities I truly respect.

Mitch gave a speech the other day at the Web 2.0 conference where he talked about some of the things that are broken with American politics and how open source technology projects show some examples of process that could point the way towards fixing some of the problems. It's a great speech, and it makes me even more glad I get a chance to work with Mitch and the rest of the terrific OSAF staff.

Also from open source we have the idea of transparency. Not only can you see the source code, but you can see every single bug in Bugzilla. You can see the notes from every meeting we have at OSAF.

So, yes, I think technology can help in the form of decentralized tools, greater transparency, and principle-based communities which use them. The challenges are to develop both the tools and the community practices in a synergistic way.

The latest Whispering Johnson recording project is finally complete!

You may recall I wrote previously about the actual experience of being in the studio, and how the technology had changed the way music is recorded.

Now we've seen the process all the way through - we have several boxes full of shiny shrink-wrapped CDs and a redesigned web site.

I have to admit that there's something very emotionally gratifying about actually having the tangible physical items representing the product which I don't get from just the web site. But perhaps that's just the old fuddy-duddy in me. I noticed as I was listening to the pressed CD for the first time that one of the things I missed from making records in the old days was being able to watch my band name on label in the middle of the record spin around on the turntable.

The web site features downloadable files of all of the tunes we recorded, and also has the scanned images of the sheet music for most of the tunes. All of this has been released under the Creative Commons ReCombo (which apparently got renamed Sampling Plus 1.0) license, which allows others to "sample, mash-up or otherwise creatively transform this work" as long as the authors are given credit and as long as the work is not used to advertise for or promote anything but the created work.

How are we going to make any money on this? Well, we probably won't - but what's new about that? As musicians, we're a lot more interested in getting the work heard and appreciated than we are in making money from it (that's why we have jobs :) ).

As far as I know, this is the first time that the sheet music for original tunes has been released under Creative Commons licenses. We'd be very excited if people actually played these tunes, and even better, evolved them into new iterations. For instance, it would be cool to see if somebody could put words to and sing some of these tunes!

This, of course, is no different than what musicians have always done, appropriating what they've heard and fashioning it into something new. There's a great video of a presentation from composer Anthony Kelley of Duke University (available from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain site) called "Great Composers Steal" where he talks extensively about this topic. The whole history of jazz is full of examples of jazz's greatest geniuses taking chord progressions from popular tunes and writing new melodies for them - for instance, Charlie Parker's Donna Lee is a rework of Back Home In Indiana. And if you look back in the history of music and intellectual property, you find that there have been long and intense battles over the legalities of all these kinds of appropriations of intellectual content, most of which end up having only a tangential relationship with actual practice by musicians.

There's a very good article in Wired by Chris Anderson called The Long Tail about the effect that new distribution technologies are having on sales of popular media. Anderson notes that with the abundance of inventory carried by online distribution freed from the constraints of shelf space (think Amazon, iTunes Music Store, Netflix)

Chart Rhapsody's monthly statistics and you get a "power law" demand curve that looks much like any record store's, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don't carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to '80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don't have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.

So I'm hopeful that our little recording project will find an audience out there and that the tunes will touch some responsive parts in people we wouldn't ordinarily come in contact with, and I'm proud to be a small part of changing the way music is shared around the globe. And if you want a real CD, let me know.

One of the joys of working at a university is that I get to work with people who are just plain amazing - not just in what they do at work (though they are that too), but just in all facets of their lives.

My colleague Karalee Woody, who manages the general access computing labs here, has been involved for several years with a group called Kids First VIetnam, which supports a school and rehabilitation village in central Vietnam, in the area that was the the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Vietnam. The school serves disabled kids, many of whom have been injured by land mines left over from the wars.

Last year Karalee and Kids First organized a bike ride in Vietnam to raise funds for the organization's work. They're doing it again this year, and I am going, along with my longtime friend Ed Lorah. The ride will be about 300 miles over six days in late February and early March, going from the northern to the central parts of the country, along with some time for really exploring the country. More info on the ride is available here.

We've also set up a weblog to talk about our experiences preparing for and taking this trip - should be interesting and challenging!

It's time once again for Seattle's Earshot Jazz Festival - and what a masterful job John Gilbreath and his crew have done this year!

Some highlights (at least from my viewpoint):

An absolute don't miss evening with the Jim Hall Trio including Terry Clark on drums and Don Thompson on bass on November 5. This is the trio that recorded the wonderful Jim Hall Live disk back in 1975. A classic, deep yet understated guitar trio.

The venerable South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim plays on November 1. He's been playing jazz internationally since the late 1940's and brings a wonderful, swinging, melodic sensibility to the music, yet is always reaching for new inspirations.

Randy Weston played piano with such bebop luminaries as Nicholas Payton and Kenny Dorham in the '50s, then went to Africa in the early '60s and later lived in Morocco. He was one of the first jazz musicians to re-integrate the African-American jazz tradition with current and traditional African music. He'll be playing on October 28.

Rokia Traore, a wonderful Malian singer, Rokia Traore blends traditional Malian singing with contemporary world-music. She put on some terrific performances at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival a couple of years back, and I suspect she's grown substantially as an artist since.

The eclectic reedman Don Byron, who's most known for being a modern clarinet master, is playing Halloween night (October 31), this time on tenor sax - the program says: Don Byron celebrates the 1946 recording sessions that teamed Nat “King” Cole, Buddy Rich, and the tenor-sax titan Lester Young. With piano star Jason Moran and drum monster Billy Hart, Byron, the most touted clarinetist in jazz, again takes up the sax to honor Young’s lyrical innovations. Don Byron gives a pre-concert presentation about the legacy of Lester Young.

There's lots more - get out there and support our local festival - I think it's the best jazz festival in North America!

Here's a question for all the web authoring gurus out there:

While working on updating a web site last week I had an inline CSS stylesheet that used the

 background-image

body

When I moved the stylesheet into a separate file as a linked stylesheet, the background image ceased to work, though everything else worked fine.

Both the html and css files are in the same directory, with the relative path to the image being exactly the same.

What am I doing wrong?

UPDATE -

Karl Nelson from the Digital Learning Commons tracked this one down - I had html

style

While working on updating a web version of an organizational chart last week, I needed to build an html image map. Looking for a good tool to do that with on OS X, I came across the Taco HTML Editor, which has a nifty image map wizard - highly recommended. It's even freeware!

Taco HTML Edit is a full-featured freeware HTML editor. It is designed exclusively for Mac OS X and uses many of the core technologies built into Mac OS X including image transparency (in the image map wizard), toolbars, Webkit (for live previewing), and much more.

Here's a screenshot of the image map editor:

Jennifer Jenkins from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain writes to note that they've extended the deadling of their Moving Image Contest till November 1.

What is it?

A contest to create a 2-minute moving image that explains to the public some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing particularly on either music or documentary film.

Prizes include a Dual G5 or Alienware Roswell, a cool Handycam, and an iPod.

These folks are doing important work - so check 'em out!