September 2005 Archives

Seattle alt-popsters Harvey Danger (former UW students) have put their new album up for for full download with no copy protection or anything.

Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.

...

We embark on this experiment with both enthusiasm and curiosity—and, ok, maybe a twinge of anxiety. Why are we doing this? The short answer is simply that we want a lot of people to hear the record.

However, it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign, along with radio and press promotion, live shows, and videos. It’s a bet that the resources of the Internet can make possible a new way for musicians to find their audience – and forge a meaningful artistic career built on support from cooperative, not adversarial, relationships.

These sound like smart guys. I've never listened to Harvey Danger, but you can bet I'm starting tonight.

Chuck Kenney, our local Apple rep, dropped by an iPod Nano for us to take a look before I left for last week's meetings on the East Coast. I finally had time to take it out of the box this morning and play with it just a little.

As many others have commented, the Nano inspires pure techno-object lust. Apple has managed to package the incredibly nice iPod user interface into a tiny package, including the scroll wheel, full color screen, and all. Four gigabytes of data in an incredibly small package with no moving parts - wow!

One thing I managed to do today on it (in addition to putting a bunch of music on) is to export an ical file from Oracle Calendar, import it into Apple's iCal software and synchronize that onto the iPod. With one of these, maybe I won't forget where I'm walking as I'm grooving my way across campus to my next meeting!

Our local Napster service here at the UW went live for registration this morning. The service is open to all students living in the UW Residence Halls, with no fee.

Rick Ells put together a very nice web page that highlights Napster and other digital music services that we think are likely to be of interest to students and other music fans here at the UW.

One thing that's significant about this service is that we and Napster are using Shibboleth, the Internet2 software for cross-domain authentication, to allow students to register for this service using their UW NetID. This is not Napster's first implementation of Shibboleth, but it's a great demonstration of the use of standards - Napster doesn't have to do separate coding to support each institution's local authentication system.

Nice work, everybody!

There's still lots of work to be done, including the installation of the local caching servers from Dell - we're looking forward to seeing how usage ramps up here at the UW.

Oh, man - this is too cool.

This coming week my colleagues at The Research Channel will be broadcasting a live stream of volcanoes on the ocean floor, along the Juan de Fuca Ridge, which lies 200 miles off the Washington coast. The live feed will be Sept 28 and 29 from 10 am to 6 pm, Pacific time.

The images will be shot in high-definition by a camera mounted on the Jason rover, tethered to the UW's Tommy Thompson research vessel, then beamed to shore via satellite. If you're at an Internet2 site with multicast enabled, you'll be able to watch it in 6 Mbps high-def, but anybody with a broadband connection can watch the Windows Media versions. More info is on Visions05 pages. High definition video over the Internet live from ocean floor volcanoes - how cool is that?

This expedition is precursor to the Neptune project:

The expedition’s goals include mapping and video coverage of areas along the northern portion of the NEPTUNE program study area. NEPTUNE is a planned U.S./Canadian underwater observatory. An instrumented network of 2,000 miles of fiber-optic/power cable will give researchers real-time, interactive observations of and experiments within the ocean, seafloor and subseafloor, as well as the biological communities that thrive there.

The bad news is that US Air managed to lose my suitcase coming home from CSG last night. That's what I get for not carrying it on - it happened to both Bob Morgan and me, on the same flights, so my guess is that our luggage just didn't make it on the plane in Charlotte, but their tracking system didn't show that.

The good news is for .Mac subscribers:

.Mac membership now comes with 1 GB of combined .Mac Mail and iDisk storage and monthly data transfer limits have been increased to 10 GB. We have already updated your account. You can use your Account Settings to take advantage of .Mac's storage flexibility and reallocate storage to best fit the way you use the service.

We value your membership and hope you enjoy these enhancements to your .Mac service.
Sincerely,

Sheila has shown us the timeline for Chandler development. I like the five stages of software feature development they're using:

embryonic -> initial -> plausible -> dogfood -> usable

Sheila is showing the Westwood Advisory Council for Chandler the latest build of the coming 0.6 Chandler software.

The calendar is now displaying colors, supports recurrence, and display of multiple calendars. One big new feature is that individual events are specific to a timezone - this will help a lot with those of us who travel.

There's a new web page of the Chandler development timeline that makes it far clearer which sets of features and usability are targeted for which releases.

Lisa is giving a presentation that started with articulating the current vision of the project - Mitch noted that this is the first time in four years that anybody other than he has given the vision statement.

Now she's talking about paradigms for email usage and the implications of that for workflow UI in Chandler.

All of the slides for the WAC meeting are available on the OSAF Wiki.

Jon Giltner from Colorado notes that they respond to about 50 incidents per week. They have a formal documented process established in 2004 that requires notification and involvement of central IT. They use the CERIAS open response database for tracking.

If the incident involves compromise of PII they form a team and mandate independent forensics with a third party company that takes the machine and does the forensics. The team's primary role is to handle communications - notification to affected individuals (via US postal mail using); any press release, etc.

Who's involved? Legal Counsel, compromised department head; IT security coordinator; tech lead from dept; campus police; university communications; university privacy officer; university officer with oversight for compromised departments.

They take pains not to point the finger too quickly at the local IT admin - they're usually overworked, underfunded, and not always properly trained.

There follows some discussion of some specific incidents at some our institutions, and lessons learned.

In one incident a visiting researcher from another institution had a file obtained from the state that contained names and SSNs. The researcher put a laptop containing that information on the campus network despite not meeting campus minimum standards for up-to-date patching and OS levels, and sure enough it was compromised.

The issue of who ends up paying the bill for notification of the people whose information was compromised may well end up in court.

This institution has very good policies about security - but that doesn't really make much difference as what they have is massive non-compliance across the campus. And that's not just because people don't know about the policies. It takes massive culture change, and the top leadership of the institution is now very concerned about it. They have an online security tutorial, and the cabinet has now approved a requirement that everyone complete this tutorial.

They are now doing proactive scans of machines on the network, using a product from MacAfee.

A CIO is describing another incident where a machine containing personal and financial information in a department was compromised. Again, this was an incident where the information was being gathered in violation of institutional policy.

What lessons were learned?

- funding security matters, and it's difficult to obtain on an ongoing basis.
- distributed computing environments are difficult to secure, due to social factors, not technical. In this instance the time-to-market for a web site took precedence over a known security hole.
- the institution had no list of where sensitive data is stored - how can you do a risk assessment?
- patch management and antivirus installation is ad-hoc - who's responsible? Often it's students bringing up servers, and they don't always have a clue about securing the machines.
- How do we help system administrators respond responsibly to unreasonable demands from their management?
- Central IT is frequently aware of compromises in departments before the department itself.
- Unpatched web servers are often a vector for compromises

Last night featured a lovely cruise on Pittsburgh's three rivers - the weather was lovely, the beer (Iron City) was free, and the company was great.

Jack McCredie from UC Berkeley regaled us with tales of growing up in Pittsburgh when it was still the steel city with all the mills going on along the river - now it's all been converted to restaurants, parks, and ball stadiums.

The evening ended with a long chat between Terry Gray, Lisa Dusseault and me. While I won't try to recap the conversation, it revolved around IMAP, HTTP, connection vs. connectionless protocols, authentication for WebDAV, etc.

Here's a photo of Terry and Jack Duwe on the boat.

Cliff Lynch is noting that we talked a tremendous amount about repositories today, and that the approach was largely technical. If you talk to administrators, faculty, or librarians, you'll get very different views on what these are for, even though when you peel away the social and political layers you get something that looks very similar.

CNI has been concentrating for the past year or two on what are referred to as Institutional Repositories - a service that has a significant insitutional commitment behind it that documents the academic or cultural life of the institution. That covers a place where you put digital materials created by faculty, documenting performances that happen in a university community. Typically it's not a place where you're doing frontline teaching and learning - it's not a course management system. Course management systems generally have lots more specialized services than repositories. There are lots of questions about how rich the functionality in institutional repositories should be.

If you think about putting documents in and getting them out and perhaps migrating document formats over time, that's a good set of functions. Now let's think about video - you can think about it in terms of a large file - put it in, pull it out - what you do with after is not the repository's business. But you can think of video in the context of including streaming, handling different bit rates, etc etc. These are the types of scoping questions we see around institutional repositories.

There are lots of repositories on campus besides just institutional repositories and course management systems. All kinds of research groups setting up repositories - often on the same software used for the institutional repository. What's different is the scale of implementation and the extent of institutional commitment.

There are two major streams of argument that have been used to support deployment of institutional repositories. One talks about the move to production of scholarship in digital form - scholarship that is more than page images, but encompasses datasets, software, simulations, etc that don't fit into the tradition of scholarly journals or monographs. In order to keep scholarship healthy institutions need to take responsibility for archiving and maintaining these materials.

The other argument runs around a set of issues that go around the rubric of "open access" - a policy position that says that the reporting of scholarship should be free and openly accessible and that the Internet makes that possible at a low cost and that it breaks down barriers to scientific progress, bridges equity gaps between nations and communities. On other argument that has some political traction is that a tremendous amount of research is paid for by the government and that citizens have the right to access it. This is the open access thesis. One of the strategies is for scholars to deposit copies of works into public repositories, either institutional or discipline-based. This approach is getting traction in both the US and Europe.

You have these two justifications, but we don't really know much about what is in institutional repositories or how many of them are deployed. CNI did a project on repositories in 13 countries and then pulled together a meeting in Amsterdam to understand similarities and variations in implementations. There are two articles on this in D-LIB magazine last week.

A couple of significant highlights - there are a couple of nations in Europe that have an institutional repository deployed in every higher education institution in the country. There are other nations where deployment rates are very low. In the US they looked at CNI membership which is primarily research institutions. They found around 40% had some sort of repository deployed, and around 80% of the rest had some planning underway.

In almost all institutions the intellectual leadership for this activity has come from the Libraries.

If you look at the European data they are doing this mostly about open access, and if you look at the material in repositories it's mostly textual material. If you look in the US the picture is quite different - there's lots of stuff that isn't textual. Everything from architectural models, video, datasets, software, etc. Institutional repositories may be picking up the need for places to store data that are filled by national data centers in other countries.

While we thought we had a reasonable working definition of institutional repository, the thing that came through very clearly is how chaotic the campus environment is. The relationships of repositories and course management are confused, there are lots of departmental repositories where people don't talk together or to the central repository. Lots of confusion over what's a digital library and what's an institutional repository. It would be useful to try to get some working definitions at least at a campus level.

There is considerable interest at the policy level in the US in starting to get a handle on the datasets that produced as a result of research activity. The NIH put a requirement on all grants over $.5 million to have a data plan. The grant holders naturally want to hand over long term responsibility for this to the institution. The National Science Board issued a set of policy recommendations around long-lived data standards. It's worth looking at because this is the beginning of setting policy principles that will affect grant awards at institutions that will drive us to deal with data stewardship. The Office of Science and Technology Policy has also picked up on this report.

CNI as of earlier this week started an informal call for experience from institutional representatives to get additional insight into what's going on.

John Wilkin from U Michigan is talking about the University's deal with Google for digitizing library content.

Larry Page from Google is a Michigan grad, and at a dinner on campus he said he'd like to digitize the entire library collection, and they took him seriously. They agreed on non-destructive conversion that would produce files of sufficient resolution to serve as a stand-in for the physical object, and the University would maintain rights to the materials.

The bound print content of the Library will be digitized - the Library holds seven million volumes.

The contract between the University and Google is online at http://www.lib.umich.edu/mdp/. There is a lightweight set of indemnifications in the agreement. There is agreement that the materials will not be out of circulation for long.

Copies of the images go to both Google and the University.

Why did they do this? Ubiquitous access is part of what it means to be a research library. Having access through Google widens access.

Why would Google do this? To "help maintain the preeminence of books and libraries in our increasingly Internet-centric culture..."

They University gets a package of files for every volume that's identified by barcode - 600dpi bitonal images for print and 300dpi JPEG color/grayscale for illustrations. Michigan reports that the OCR quality is good.

Tim Sigmon is talking about the development of the UVa digital library, where they area attempting to really offer integrated searching and delivery of digital library content.

One of the issues was coming up with common metadata for describing these digital objects. There was a steering group to review formats and come up with standards. There are descriptive and administrative metadata standards.

They also needed new specs for how images would be stored in these collections. Three content models were developed uvaHighRes, which includes preview, screen-sized and high quality large image; ivaLowRes - only preview and screen-sized images; and uvaBitonal- bitonal TIFFs only. One content model and production standard were set for image metadata.

Texts are represented in a local extension of the TEI DTD, along with encoding guudelines. There are three content models for text: uvaGenText - transcription with no page images; uvaPageBook - page images with no transcription; and uvaBook which has both transcription and page images. All page images must conform to the image standards.

Archival finding aids were specified - uvaEAD (encoded archival description 2002). Images and texts must conform to the content models.

There are two default disseminators on every object: Default access behavior, including getPreview, getFullView, getLabel, getDefaultContent; and Admin and descriptive metadata behaviors. There are also class-specific disseminators for different kinds of objects.

They built some tools for users of the DL, including a "shopping cart" for people to collect their digital objects as they search and browse, and then do things with that collection, e.g. to create a slide-show for a lecture.

They had to create processes to convert legacy images, texts, and finding aids, as well as the work flow for getting content into the repository - this wasn't primarily a technical issue but changing the way library catalogers do business.

There's a demo at http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/collections/

Alex Vigdor from Columbia University is talking about HyperContent - a web content management system that is a JA-SIG project.

Alex's slides are here.

The client is browser-based, with data kept in XML. It maintains a history of file revisions and has granular permissions. It allows set up of approvals, notifications and scehduled publications and emails.

The resulting content is pushed out to be served by Apache or whatever web server you use.

It automatically generates navigation and site maps.

Content authoring tools include wysiwyg html and xml editing, image conversion, drag & drop navigation and site map amanagement, dublin core metadata, vcard contact info w/ldap lookup, spell checking in multiple languages, etc. It also provides image watermarking.

Access to the repository includes local, FTP, & SFTP. They have plans to support WebDAV in the future. The publishing is handled by a queue system that handles the staging of processing and distribution among cluster members.

There's a simple but functional workflow model.

There's pluggable authentication which uses JAAS LoginModules. They've made it compatible with CAS too. They will integrate with JA-SIG groups and permissions that have been split out from uPortal.

They can feed XML or XHTML to uPortal channels.

Version 2 beta is winding down.

WSRP and UDDI portlet publishing will be looked into soon.

Update 22 Feb 2006 - Doug (not Tom!) wrote to let me know I got his first name wrong - sorry, Doug!

Tom Doug Blair from CMU is talking about their selection process for a Content Management system.

Tom Doug notes that there are institutional problems and that you have to have institutional will to solve the problems. They have about 120 web practitioners in a group that is guiding the process. THere are six committees: Portal, Search, Standards & Practices, Infrastructure, Marketing, and CMS.

The CMS committee interviewed a couple of dozen people across the campus about their web publishing practices. They brought them back in the room to reflect back their findings - they found that having that discussion changed the answers and refined the results.

From that they wrote an RFP, which they checked with a consultant to make sure they were using the same terminology as vendors use. That RFP was released today.

Tom Doug notes that there are several things a CMS will not do - including improving the quality of content, changing human processes, or making content more timely.

He also notes to expect some resistance from practitioners. It's important the process is transparent to the people participating - and requires thinking broadly about governance of the process.

Piet Niederhausen from Georgetown isn talking about their content management.

Piet differentiates managing departmental content from institutional content.

They have a graph of their institutional content and how the major pieces relate to each other. For instance the CMS manages content about people, so a faculty member would have CG, Media profiles, publications, etc.

The idea of syndicating content to be used in different forms such as RSS, podcasts, etc becomes important. This implies a cultural shift where presentation of content is driven by topics rather than organizations or units. The CMS tools should be able to gather content and aggregate it and syndicate it. So they find themselves working on a separate syndication layer which is separate. It's about collecting data from different places, caching it, and making it available in different forms.

The CMS should be able to easily reference information stored in various repositories, such as in the course management system, institutional filesystems and departmental websites, etc.

This is an interesting and holistic view of content management that bears thinking about.

Tom Dopirak is going over the survey that was done on Content Management for the CSG meeting. Slides are online at http://www.stonesoup.org/Meeting.next/repos.pres/

Only about ten institutions offer institutional level CM systems, and they're mostly vendors instead of open source implementations.

The primary business drivers were to distribute responsibility for content development and to separate content from design.

Most are using Web browsers as publishing targets but many also target mobile devices. Delaware targets both RSS and email for publishing.

Almost none of the respondents are using complex workflow. Most are using just two roles. In response to a question Georgetown stated that they found that most departments do all of the review of content offline before it gets into the CMS, and that almost no roles are used.

Jeff Merriman from MIT is talking about the OKI Repository OSIDs.

Jeff makes the distingtion between Data Specifications, Interface specifications, and protocol specifications as separate parts of interoperability that should be separated out explicitly.

The Repository OSID is a Service Interface only - it's silent on protocol/access technology. There are Java, PHP, and Objective-C instantiations of the binding. The spec is supportive of various metadata through "typing".

Jeff demonstrated a number of applications searching and retrieving data from a range of disparate repositories using the OSIDs. One compelling application is the Vue2 image-enabled concept mapping tool, which allows hierarchical narratives as presentations.

Documentation is online at http://www.okiproject.org/specs/osid_12.html

In response to a question about the relationship between this Repository OSID and the JSR170 content management spec, Jeff talked about how the OSID is more narrowly focused (JSR170 includes things like workflow that will be in other OSIDs), but that it should be possible to map from one to the other and they plan to work on that at some point.

Brad Wheeler from Indiana is talking about the Twin Peaks Navigator which is intended to connect course management systems with repository content.

One of the issues this hopes to solve is the issue of students having to buy course packs containing photocopies of data the institution already has online.

They wanted to be able to store pointers to all sorts of digital content, even if it's in a protected source such as a library database.

The idea is for a faculty member to be able to easily embed links to data sources within the online course content. In the implementation there's a button that invokes a library search within the WYSIWYG editor. Very cool!

http://www.twinpeaks.libraryinfotech.org/
https://twinpeaks.dev.java.net/

The hope is to have this integrated into the next version of Sakai.

Mimi Yin from OSAF has posted a great set of slides titled Chandler In A Nutshell. These slides show the real innovative work the the OSAF folks are doing on re-envisioning the ways in which people actually interact with their personal data. It's worth looking at this.

David Millman from Columbia is giving an update on MIT's DSpace repository. David notes that the first year of DSpace was a focus on how to approach the idea of an institutional repository, not particularly on the technology.

There are 103 live DSpace sites, 38 in the US and 65 outside the US. Those numbers are from a CNI survey.

Tim Sigmon from UVa is leading off with an update on the Fedora repository. Tim's slides are here.

The repository functionality exposes a number of APIs through web services: management, access, search, index search, and an OAI provider. Authn and Authz modules will be coming out in release 2.1, at the end of this month.

Different diseminators "vend out" different views of an object - for instance, a gif and a tif of the same image.

Version 2.0 is the current version, came out in Jan 2005. It changed the underlying description of storage to an XML description called FOXML. They also added representation of object-to-object relationships with an RDF schema - that's the "resource index". For instance you can store that objects are members of a collection. The RI search allows querying of those relationships.

In 2.1 they're converting from a Mozilla license to an ECL license. It will have Authentication Plugins for Tomcat user/password, LDAP, or Radius, and an Authorization model using XML-based policies written in XACML. Policies can be repository-wide or on specific objects. There will be a Policy Builder Client with a simple UI to create access policies that will generate the XACML. They're also adding a Directory Ingest Service and client tool to facilitate ingest of hierarchical directories and zip or jar files. The tools will allow automatic representation of that hierarchy in Fedora.

Fedora was not built with an easy UI in mind - it was built as a repository that applications could be built on top of. But development will begin this fall on an web-based Institutional Repository client.

They're planning a lot of work on federating repositories. Shibboleth implementation is almost done.

VTLS is offering commercial support for Fedora, and have done a bunch of work on enhancements, including making Fedora repositories visible to Google searching.

The CSG Workshops today and tomorrow morning are being webcast. You can the webcasts here.

Usable design expert Donald Norman has written an interesting article that discusses the shortcomings of the currently popular approach to designing systems based around human input, usually called Human Centered Design or User Centered Design. I think he articulates far better than I can some of the factors that cause me to be uneasy with a blind commitment to UCD methodologies. Definitely worth a read.

One basic philosophy of HCD is to listen to users, to take their complaints and critiques seriously. Yes, listening to customers is always wise, but acceding to their requests can lead to overly complex designs. Several major software companies, proud of their human-centered philosophy, suffer from this problem. Their software gets more complex and less understandable with each revision. Activity-Centered philosophy tends to guard against this error because the focus is upon the Activity, not the Human. As a result, there is a cohesive, well-articulated design model. If a user suggestion fails to fit within this design model, it should be discarded. Alas, all too many companies, proud of listening to their users, would put it in.

Here, what is needed is a strong, authoritative designer who can examine the suggestions and evaluate them in terms of the requirements of the activity. When necessary, it is essential to be able to ignore the requests. This is the goal to cohesion and understandability. Paradoxically, the best way to satisfy users is sometimes to ignore them.

Richard Bendis is prsident & CEO of Innovation Philaselphia.

Wireless Philadelphia is the local effort to be one of the first totally connected wireless cities in the US. The rollout effort will start this month. Interestingly enough, one of the objectives in the vision statement is to reduce the cost of city government. There will be 2,500 WiFil access points on light poles connected to WiMax installations on rooftops.

The City is viewing this as a way of encouraging and enabling the growth of small and mid-sized businesses throughout the city, as well as enabling learning for students across the city.

Wireless Philadelphia is a separate 501(c)3 nonprofit. It issued an RFP for the network in April. There were two finalists, HP and Earthlink, and decision will be made this month. The entire city network is expected to be available in Summer/Fall 2006. Is this cool, or what?

I came in late (east coast early morning sessions are hard the first day) to a session on identity management to hear Bob Morgan talking about how we're likely to see two different kinds of federated identity management in the future: one that is driven by compliance and legislation where there are a small number of large identity providers at a national level; the other being lots of small loosely-federated identity providers in an ever-shifting tapestry as needs require.

Now Kirk Brown from Sun is talking about their concept of federated identity management. While there's not a lot of detail here, it strikes me that their solution is a broker between multiple identities and identity providers. The example he gave of this in use is at Wells Fargo in their bill-paying service, which brokers lots of identities behind the scenes.

Mike Jones from Microsoft describes himself as a "protocol evangelist" within Microsoft. He's talking about how identities work within contexts - coffee cards work at a given coffee stand, bank cards work at an ATM, etc. He gives the old example of using a SSN as a student ID as an example of misuse of a context. The lessons MS learned from Passport. Posport was designed to be an identity provider for Microsoft's online properties - where it's been a huge success (250+ million users). But it was also hoped to be a global Internet id provder - where it was a complete failure, for social and political reasons, not technical.

Mike is going through Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity. The conclusion they came to from those laws is to define a Metasystem of identities - something that will do for identity what IP did for defining a common layer of internetworking. Like IP did not replace ethernet, this metasystem will not replace SAML or Kerberos or X.509. This is the basis of WS-Trust and WS-MetadataExchange web services. He showed a mockup of how this might look to a user, where information about the identity of a site is presented to the user for their perusal so they can decide to accept it or not, and then the user can choose which of many of their identities they want to present back to the site. They're talking to Apple, Mozilla, Sun and others about these protocols.

Fall is here in Seattle - the days are shorter and cooler, the rain has returned, and it's time for the Earshot Jazz Festival.

Once again, John Gilbreath and his crew of hard-working colleagues have put together one of, if not the, best jazz festivals in the world.

While I haven't bought tickets yet, performances that are on my list for this year include:

• Bulgarian Bebop: Yuri Yunakov Ensemble w/ Ivo Papasov at Town Hall on Oct 19 - I don't know Yuri Yunakov, but I couldn't believe the astounding virtuosity of Ivo Papasov when I first heard his Bulgarian Wedding Band fifteen years ago, and the music is unbelievably complex and dense. Think the Mahavishnu Orchestra on borscht and pirogies.


• World Saxophone Quartet Experience: Tribute To Jimi Hendrix on Oct 21 at the Triple Door. I noticed that the WSQ recently celebrated their 25th anniversary. David Murray, Hammiet Bluiett, and Oliver Lake - what more could you ask for (well, Julius Hemphill, RIP)?

  When asked why play Hendrix, David Murray said: Everybody likes Jimi Hendrix. Everybody in the band likes Jimi Hendrix. I think the world likes Jimi Hendrix.



• Omar Sosa Quartet & Dafnis Prieto Quintet at the Triple Door on Oct 23. A couple of young Cuban jazz guys (pianist and percussionist, respectively) with their groups.


• Dave Douglas: Keystone at the Triple Door on Oct 24. The very cool NY trumpeter and composer with an electric group playing his original scores for the silent film comedies of Fatty Arbuckle. The program doesn't say whether they'll be showing the films, but I'd imagine they will.


• Joey Defrancesco Trio Oct 26 at the Triple Door - I'm a sucker for a bluesy Hammond organ, and DeFrancesco is the reigning heir to the tradition.


• Olu Dara Quartet Oct 30 at the Triple Door. I first knew Olu Dara as a trumpeter in the NY jazz scene of the late 70s and early 80s. Now he's become a roots-blues-americana treasure, but there's still a bit of the avant-garde impusle in there too. Not to be missed.


• Ravi Coltrane Quartet Nov 2 at the Triple Door. Yes, he's John's son, but he sounds to me more influenced by Joe Henderson, and he's becoming an important voice on his own.


• GangbÉ Brass Band at the Triple Door on Nov 5. They're from Benin, and the program says a fusion of Lagos and New Orleans. What more do you need to know?


• Virginia Rodrigues on Nov 6 at the Triple Door. She's a Brazillian vocalist, and the samples I've heard sound amazing.

There's lots more, so check it out - support our local festival!

I put together a icalendar format ( .ics) file for next week's CSG meeting at CMU. It should load into Apple ical, Oracle calendar, and perhaps others with no problem.

If anybody uses this besides me, note that I did not include the Westwood Advisory Council meeting on it, as that's not an event that everybody at CSG goes to.

I'll be at both ends of Pennsylvania next week, starting off with the Fall Internet2 Members meeting in Philadelphia and then going to the Fall CSG meeting at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately these events got scheduled with significant overlap in the middle of the week (there were apparently hotel glitches for I2 in Philadelphia that couldn't be resolved in other ways), so I'll only be at I2 for part of Monday and most of Tuesday before heading off to CSG.

The CSG Long Workshop on Wednesday is on CSG Institutional Repositories, Digital Libraries, Content Management. The Short Workshop on Thursday morning is on Enterprise data (decentralized control, data security and privacy). Typically those sessions are webcast - info will be on the CSG web page under Next Meeting.

This will be my first Internet2 meeting - it should be an interesting one for me, as the RIAA and MPAA have both just joined the organization.

The Internet2 folks sent this mail about the upcoming meeting:

Dear Colleagues,

Not to be missed is the gala evening reception at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on Wednesday, September 21st!  The "Bridging the Ancient and Modern: New Ways of Thinking about Archaeology and Anthropology Using Internet2" event program will include a formal program with the Museum Director, Dr. Richard Leventhal guiding us through the new and exciting ways that advanced networks are being used in the study of ancient cultures.  Dr Leventhal will be talking live with Tlingit artists in Anchorage and with faculty from a number of different Internet2 member schools who are involved with an archaeological dig in Cairo, Egypt.  Dr. Leventhal's presentation will be offered at 7:00 pm and again at 8:00 pm. There will also be two exciting demonstration stations in the museum where mummies will be scanned using modern-day CT equipment and 3D archaeological structures will be presented.  Internet2 Member Meeting attendees will have full access to the exquisite Museum and all of the Museum exhibits for the entire evening!  Of course, there will be plenty of food and drink and transportation will be provided to and from the Museum starting at: 6:15 pm at the 17th Street entrance to the Wyndham hotel.  Further information about the Gala Museum event can be found at:  http://events.internet2.edu/2005/fall-mm/gala.html .

Well, we've spent the last two days going over lots of details about calendaring interoperability - Yesterday was mostly about hammering through a long list of use-cases. While I haven't typically been a big fan of use-cases for designing software, they are critical for being able to define success in interoperability between disparate pieces of software. If we do this right, and the interoperability tests eventually meet the use-cases, then we will know we have success.

Eight of us had a great Thai dinner last night and talked about trying to get to a point where we actually have a set of roadmaps that define the work we're doing in the CalConnect group - and in a moment of weakness I volunteered to coordinate that effort. If anybody has good examples of technology roadmaps they want to pass along, I'd appreciate it.

Today we spent most of the morning in talking about domain models, without, I think, achieving complete clarity, but seeing more of the issues.

This afternoon has been spent catching up on the work on the CalDAV standard - lots of great work going on in further defining the standard, and it looks like there will be a final call on the draft sometime soon.

Then we talked about authentication models for CalDAV - there's lots of problems with web authentication, and WebDAV has inherited those problems, and therefore CalDAV inherits those problems.

Then we discussed time zones. Hoo-boy - can you believe that there is no authoritative listing of time zones? The best available is the so-called Olson database, which is something put together as a hobby by someone named Olson who works at NIH. Sheesh. And who knew that there are some time zones that vary from others by 15 minutes? Yikes.

The interop wrapped up - no detailed results shared yet, but everybody felt that it went really well. We had six different implementations of CalDAV attempting interoperation with each other - fabulous!

Kevin Sites is an independent journalist and blogger who has been reporting from war zones, most recently working for NBC in Iraq. He's provided incredible insightful reporting of events he's witnessed on his blog.

Now he's been hired by Yahoo! where he'll have his own special site called Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone. This is a significant move by Yahoo! into a whole new area of areas of journalism that previously have primarily been the domain of establshed mainstream media.

This should be interesting.

Ben Goldacre has a great column in the Guardian Unlimited on how badly science gets represented in the media.

Remember all those stories about the danger of mobile phones? I was on holiday at the time, and not looking things up obsessively on PubMed; but off in the sunshine I must have read 15 newspaper articles on the subject. Not one told me what the experiment flagging up the danger was. What was the exposure, the measured outcome, was it human or animal data? Figures? Anything? Nothing. I've never bothered to look it up for myself, and so I'm still as much in the dark as you.

Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.

Is it just me, or does Bill Gates sound really confused and muddled in this CNET interview?

The architecture we are interested in we call server-equals-service, so that we will have the full Exchange capability that you can subscribe to, where we run it, or you can have it on-premise with the traditional licensing approach. At this conference, we do give out APIs (application programming interfaces) for the MSN Search and the MSN Virtual Earth capability, so things that have been cloud-based services, you can have client applications that other services can connect to. So, I'd say the evolution is server to service, and bringing that symmetry in.

Carlo Longino has a good post over in Gizmodo that talks about Nokia's new Python implementation on its Series 60 phones - I look forward to trying it out.

The port of Python is a full implementation with a high degree of portability from the desktop environment, opening mobile development to a whole new class of programmers—which was its primary goal, says Erik Smartt, the program manager of Python for Series 60. “By choosing a developer-friendly, easy-to-learn language, Nokia is making it possible for casual developers to tinker with their mobile phones and innovate without the typical investment costs for embedded system development,” he says. “Bringing a language like Python to Nokia devices changes the rules on who can create applications.”

Napster's John Fogarty dropped an email noting Napster's new Download to Donate playlist - a cool idea.

The ready-to-burn 15-song "Download to Donate" compilation is available to anyone who has the Napster software, available for free at www.napster.com. Songs include Louis Armstrong's "When the Saints Go Marching In," Ted Hawkins' "Biloxi," Elton John's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me," Bill Withers' "Lean on Me," and "Walking to New Orleans" by the legendary Fats Domino, who at press time was among the tens of thousands of people unaccounted for in New Orleans.

I'm in San Francisco again, this time for the Calconnect Calendaring Consortium meeting, hosted by OSAF.

Cyrus Daboo just spoke about the upcoming changes in Daylight Savings Time in the US, which have impacts for calendaring software. The bill that got passed by the US Congress pushed the changes back to 2007, instead of the originally proposed 2006.

There's some discussion about the fact that when this happens it will likely put US DST dates out of sync with the Canadian ones, which will make owners of devices pick between, for instance, US Eastern timezones and Canadian Eastern timezones.

This looks like it should be a good gathering in Seattle:

KENYON HALL KATRINA RELIEF
Concert  and  dance
Sunday, September 18th, 2005
1:00pm-10:00pm

Kenyon Hall
7904 35th Ave. SW
Seattle, WA 98126

Contemporary and traditional gospel Music, New Orleans rag time and blues
Cajun and zydeco dance bands
all volunteer!!!

Witherspoon
Swamp  soul
Cayenne
Les Femmes d'Enfer
How's Bayou
Total experience gospel choir
Casey mcgill
File Gumbo Zydeco Band
Zydeco Locals
Big Squeezy

Southern food donated by Pat Wright's friends from New Orleans. Hall and
kitchen donated by Lou Magor.   www.kenyonhall.org

Suggested donation $20    100% proceeds will go to hurricane relief through:
Mobberly Baptist Church 625 E. Loop 281, Longview, Texas 75605

From eWeek's story on the new Firefox 1.5 beta:

With the extension problem out of the way, though, no matter whether you run Firefox 1.5 on a Windows, Linux or Mac OS system, you won't be able to tell the difference between this beta and the currently shipping Firefox 1.06.

This is a far cry from Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 beta, which will only be available in its fully secured version on the forthcoming Vista operating system. IE 7's improvements are largely surface features such as tabbed browsing.

Last month I noted Tom Friedman's op-ed in the NY Times calling for more public broadband connectivity. In that piece he mentions Andrew Rasiej, who's running for Public Advocate office in New York on a platform calling for citywide municipally-owned WiFi.

Micah Sifry dropped me an email last night noting that there's only three days left until the NY primary.

We've certainly seen the devastating results of underinvestment in public infrastructure all too tragically demonstrated.

In the next decade, the fabric of network connectivity will be an even more critical part of the infrastructure that we depend on to work, whatever might happen - so calling for making those investments now seems prudent to me.

And I like the fact that Rasiej contrasts the cost of a wifi rollout with proposed investments for sports facilities:

Philadelphia has already begun to implement a universal Wi-Fi network
that will cost only $6-$7 dollars per resident to build. That means for
about a quarter of what the Mayor wanted to spend on the failed West
Side stadium project, we can connect New York. So we have the technological know-how. We have the resources. All that’s missing is the political will.

It certainly seems self-evident that widespread network connectivity throughout New York City is likely to generate more positive and higher-order economic activity in the city than a football stadium.

While I suspect that there's a lot more to Rasiej than just his call for city wireless (he's a cofounder of the Personal Democracy Forum, for example), and I don't know all the issues involved in this race, nor what the Public Advocate of the city actually does, his forthright stance on this issue certainly shows more leadership than we've seen in other quarters lately.

So if you live in NYC, get out and vote!

Cory's got another good post out on his thoughts on the future of mobile devices, called The Future of Mobility Will Embrace Copying (and Water Won't Get Any Less Wet, Either). It's a good read.

If mobility is going to be seamless, it's going to have to work
with products from every vendor under the sun, from
multinationals to three guys in a garage in Singapore or Silicon
Valley. The seamless movement of services between devices and
locations can't hinge on the capacity of device and service
companies to cooperate with one another and to swear off locking
in their users.

A mobile future is one where all your data -- the music you buy,

the photos you take, the calendar you keep -- belongs to you and

is never put away in a box to which you lack the keys.

A lot of fuss is being made of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' move towards mandating open document formats.

I can understand the desire to make sure that government documents remain readable for the long haul - who wants to try to open the Declaration of Independence a hundred years later only to get a message like "Windows cannot open this file"? (well hopefully we'll have something better by then).

On the other hand, this is being widely interpreted as an anti-Microsoft move. Apparently the Commonwealth is requiring documents be in either Adobe PDF format or the recently approved OASIS Standard OpenDocument format.

Something seems really wrong here to me - Microsoft announced in June that the next version of Office will use their new XML formats as the default file format, and that those formats will be well documented and royalty free. And they're walking the walk on that front. While these XML formats are not real standards, debated and approved in open forums, at least it gives some hope that documents created in them will be able to be decoded in the far distant future regardless of the fate of the particular software that created them.

Microsoft's support for it's XML formats seem more open to me than Adobe's support for PDF, although it's far newer.

This move seems to have technology religion overtones to me - and while I've been a frequent critic of some of Microsoft's technologies and business practices, this seems like one area where they're doing something that is more open than many, and I think they should be encouraged to do more of it.

I haven't written anything here about the horror of Katrina and its aftermath - what can I say that hasn't been said far more eloquently elsewhere?

But I do want to mention that my all-time favorite radio station, WWOZ community radio from New Orleans, needs help from music lovers everywhere. WWOZ went off the air in advance of the hurricane and remains down now. Locally in Seattle KBCS FM, one of our fine local community stations, is going to dedicate next Tuesday, September 13, to programming New Orleans music and to solicit donations for WWOZ.

If you feel the urge to donate ahead of that, WWFMU in New York has set up a web page to accept donations at any time.

For all those who've enjoyed New Orleans music from the birth of jazz through the Nevilles, Meters, Galactic, and the whole long list of incredible music that WWOZ has helped keep alive, now's the time to show your appreciation.

About a year-and-a-half ago I wrote about the problem with importing and exporting ical standard (rfc 2445, not Apple's confusingly named calendar software) calendar data from Oracle Calendar.

I had some conversation with the Oracle Calendar crew about this when I was in Montreal last summer, and they assured me that it was a known problem that would eventually get fixed.

I hadn't thought about it for a while, but while I was out on vacation last week Kathy Christoph from the University of Wisconsin dropped a note to say she was trying to import some ical data from the Educause Conference Itinerary Builder into Oracle Cal and was having problems, and asked if I had any advice.

At the time I wrote a short Python script to handle converting data back and forth, but it looks like I didn't save that when I changed to the new iMac G5 last month.

So being a curious type, I installed a recent version of the Oracle Calendar client, version 10.1.1 and tried importing data from Educause. And it worked!

So thanks to Kathy for prodding me into looking at this again, and thanks to the Oracle crew for making progress in interperability!