Technology: July 2007 Archives
There's been a lot of discussion (much of it of the hand-wringing variety) of Mitchell Baker's Email Call To Action blog post where she talks about Mozilla splitting off the development of the Thunderbird email client software to a new organization. In today's follow-on post titled Thunderbird -- Why Change Things? she clarifies that the desire to split T-bird off arises from the phenomenal success of Firefox making it impossible for Mozilla to concentrate efforts on both products.
That seems fair enough to me. Thunderbird is a very competent mail client, and we depend on it here at the UW as an attractive alternative to the mail programs that come bundled with Windows and Macs, not to mention separate mail programs like Outlook and Entourage. It does strike me that the same could be said of Firefox, as an alternative to IE and Safari - but it can certainly be said that Firefox continues to drive innovation in the browser space, where Thunderbird has not achieved the same status for email.
My real interest, however, was in the part of the Call To Action where Mitchell talked about taking on a broader mail initaitive:
We would also like to find contributors committed to creating and implementing a new vision of mail. We would like to have a roadmap that brings wild innovation, increasing richness and fundamental improvements to mail. And equally importantly, we would like to find people with relevant expertise who would join with Mozilla to make something happen.
It seems to me that with email crippled by the deluge of spam, the rise of social networking as ways for people to connect, the start of the mass adoption of really smart handheld connected devices, and the use of synchronous communications in addition to asynchronous, that there's room for some radical rethinking of the tools we use to communicate, and I hope we can work with the Mozilla folks to imagine that future.
Technorati Tags: email, mozilla, thunderbird, social-software
A couple of weeks ago I noted that Bloglines didn't work well with the iPhone - they've not got a version that does at i.bloglines.com.
Technorati Tags: feeds, iphone, bloglines, syndication
My colleague Greg Barnes is attending O'Reilly's Open Source Conference this week in Portland, and is blogging the event over at our UW eTech blog. And while you're there, you can read Fang Lin's recent report from An Event Apart.
A question came up in a meeting I was at yesterday - to what extent are people actually subscribing to (and presumably reading) RSS (or Atom) feeds?
After casting around a bit all I could find on the web was this post from Feedburner's blog talking about the use of aggregators (hot news: Google, Yahoo!, and Bloglines are the tops).
The aggregators certainly make it easy to subscribe to feeds, but I wonder if that's the same thing as saying people are actually using feeds. When Rael Dornfest asked the crowd at O'Reilly's Emerging Tech Conference in 2006 how many people thought their feed reader was more important than their email client, a significant number of people raised their hands - but that's a pretty geekily self-selected crowd.
If you've got any data on how much you and the people around you are or aren't using feeds, and how they're being used, drop a comment to this post or send me an email.
Technorati Tags: rss, syndication, feeds
Mark Luker from Educause reports that the Reid ammendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Bill was dropped after a groundswell of criticism. Whew. There apparently is some substitute language from Sen. Kennedy being included in the "Manager's Package" on the bill that asks colleges and universities to inform their students on the following points:
(P) policies and sanctions related to copyright infringement, including --
(i) information which explicitly informs students that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including unauthorized peer to peer file sharing, may subject them to civil and criminal penalties;
(ii) a summary of the penalties for violation of copyright laws under the US Code;
(iii) a description of the institution's policies with respect to unauthorized peer to peer file sharing including disciplinary actions which are taken against students who engage in unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials using the institution's information technology system; and
(iv) a description of steps that the institution takes to prevent and detect unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material on its information technology system.
That's all stuff we're either doing already or working on, so no problems there. This is an important battle won, but it's not the end of the story by any means.
Technorati Tags: file-sharing, p2p, policy, politics
From today on Inside Higher Ed:
Showdown Over File Sharing
College officials have been aware and wary of growing Congressional interest in student file sharing of music and videos — a practice many students consider normal and that the entertainment industry views as tantamount to theft. Colleges, generally feeling caught in the middle, have worried that Congress might try to impose an unworkable solution.
And that’s what they fear could happen this week — with the Senate majority leader (needless to say someone with whom colleges do not want to pick a fight) largely responsible. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada announced his plan to prevent “campus based digital theft” through a series of requirements that he is expected to try to attach to the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, when the Senate takes up that legislation, most likely in the next day or so. The Reid plan would require colleges to:
Report annually to the U.S. Education Department on policies related to illegal downloading.
Review their procedures to be sure that they are effective.
“Provide evidence” to the Education Department that they have “developed a plan for implementing a technology-based deterrent to prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property.”
The measure would also require the education secretary to annually identify the 25 colleges and universities that have in the previous year received the most notices of copyright violations using institutional technology networks.
While those provisions are in the amendment Senator Reid unveiled last week, they could easily change today or tomorrow, and lobbyists following the situation described it as fluid.
Reporting requirements are already in the reauthorization bill, so they aren’t the reason colleges are upset. Mark Luker, vice president of Educause, said that the measure on “technology based” systems would force colleges to buy software or hardware to theoretically block file sharing when that technology hasn’t yet become effective. Some experts also question whether this technology in its current form would end up blocking file-sharing that does not violate anyone’s copyright and that supports teaching and research.
“These technologies do not work well,” Luker said. “They are really not ready for prime time and colleges should not be forced to install them.”
Our colleagues from Educause urge you to CALL today, not write, your state's U.S. senators' staff members for higher education issues and tell them how much higher education opposes this amendment. Please also call Senator Reid's office (202-224-3542), Senator Edward Kennedy's office (202-224-4543), and Senator Michael Enzi's office (202-224-3424).
Technorati Tags: copyfight, file-sharing, p2p
John Welch has a good review online in Information Week titled Two Weeks With An iPhone that talks about the iPhone with a particular slant of using the iPhone in enterprise environments. It's worth a read - though I have to admit to being biased to liking the only other person I've heard of who admits to having owned a Kyocera 6035 Smartphone (which was, not coincidentally, the last phone before the iPhone I owned that had the sense to have a dedicated vibrate/ring button).
One of the first things he talks about in the review is calendar syncing, and he agrees with what I've been guessing at, which is that we'll see over-the-air calendar synchronization via CalDAV when Apple releases the Leopard version of OS X. He also takes a guess as to what that might mean for Exchange users, who currently can't sync calendar entries to the iPhone, and he thinks it likely that the iPhone will also do LDAP in that time frame, which would be lovely:
The truth is, until Mac OS X Leopard is released, I doubt that there will be any options for over the air (OTA) sync of anything other than e-mail. Currently, Apple doesn't have a calendaring solution. They don't have a really good way to deal with networked user contact databases. Since there's no provision for OTA sync of contacts and events to any kind of server, third-party support for this is, shall we say, tricky.
However, come October and the release of Leopard Server, that changes. Apple will have a calendaring/group contact solution. I'll give you 80% odds right now that within a few weeks, if not days of the release of Leopard, you're going to see an update to the iPhone which will allow for OTA sync to CalDAV servers, and probably some OTA LDAP love, too. After all, why would Apple keep the iPhone from connecting to its own products? I quote from the Chewbacca Defense: "It does not make sense."
Once you have published ways to get contact and event data in and out of the iPhone over the air, then dealing with Exchange/Domino-style connectivity becomes far simpler, as you only have to make your server act in a way that's compatible with the iPhone. So I'll hazard that, post-Leopard, iPhone connectivity will get a lot easier.
We know that Apple is using CalDAV for its calendar client/server protocol in Leopard, and that Oracle will also be using CalDAV for Oracle Calendar (along with others like Novell and Kerio). Hopefully as this new protocol gains adherents we'll see Microsoft engineer CalDAV functionality into Exchange and Outlook, or at the very least we're likely to see third-party vendors build add-ons for those products that speak CalDAV. It's interesting to think that the impact of the iPhone could end up driving the adoption of this new open protocol.
Technorati Tags: apple, calendaring, iphone, mobile-sync, wireless
The closed nature of the wireless services run by telecom companies has always seemed outdated to those of us who've existed primarily in the open innovation model of the Internet for the last fifteen or so years, but it's been hard to make any headway in that world.
Now Google's showing its willingness to put its money where its mouth is - from a Business Wire story:
oogle (NASDAQ:GOOG - News) announced today that should the Federal Communications Commission adopt a framework requiring greater competition and consumer choice, Google intends to participate in the federal government's upcoming auction of wireless spectrum in the 700 megahertz (MHz) band.
In a filing with the FCC on July 9, Google urged the Commission to adopt rules for the auction that ensure that, regardless of who wins the spectrum at auction, consumers' interests are served. Specifically, Google encouraged the FCC to require the adoption of four types of "open" platforms as part of the license conditions:
* Open applications: Consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire;
* Open devices: Consumers should be able to utilize a handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer;
* Open services: Third parties (resellers) should be able to acquire wireless services from a 700 MHz licensee on a wholesale basis, based on reasonably nondiscriminatory commercial terms; and
* Open networks: Third parties (like internet service providers) should be able to interconnect at any technically feasible point in a 700 MHz licensee's wireless network.
Today, as a sign of Google's commitment to promoting greater innovation and choices for consumers, CEO Eric Schmidt sent a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, stating that should the FCC adopt all four license conditions requested above, Google intends to commit a minimum of $4.6 billion to bidding in the upcoming 700 MHz auction.
While I have mixed feelings about companies using their money to influence policy, that does seem to be how business gets done in Washington, particularly in the world of the FCC. Maybe having a company willing to throw billions around to do what I perceive as the right thing (for a change) is the only way progress will be made.
Technorati Tags: google, policy, wireless, telecommunications
The network folks say that in the first two weeks of the iPhone's release we saw 124 people with iPhones authenticate to our campus WiFi network, which they need to do to access off-campus resources. Given that it's summer, that's a pretty quick ramp-up for a new device. The breakdown was about two-thirds employees, one-third students.
There've been reports of iPhones causing network problems at Duke University - we're not seeing those problems here, so it may be specific to some types of network equipment in use at Duke.
Jason Ediger from Apple points out these iPhone Tech Talks that Apple is hosting - none in Seattle yet, unfortunately.
Josh Larios showed me the site for WebShell, an ajax-based ssh client for the iPhone. I haven't got it to work yet.
There's another twitter client designed for the phone, this one from thincloud.
Gizmodo likes JiveTalk as an IM client for the iPhone - does AIM, iChat, MSN, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk, ICQ, and Jabber - currently in a free alpha.
Technorati Tags: iphone
Over the years I've played with several iTunes scripts that generate web feeds of what I'm listening to. I just updated the "What's Oren Listening To Today" link on the blog web page to link to a Twitter feed called orenmusic that gets fed from iTunes via Doug Adams' Current Track to Twitter applescript.
Given that it's Twitter, you can also get an RSS feed or follow it from Twitter itself.
Slick!
I have to say that so far the iPhone is the first handheld I've used that I like more as I use it, rather than less. I think it's a game-changing device because it's primarily a WiFi enabled handheld computing device that also happens to have some well integrated phone features, rather than a phone with a bunch of computing features tacked on.
While lots of folks are complaining about the lack of ability to install native third party software on the phone, it may actually be that Apple's strategy of relying on rich web-based applications will pan out to be smart in terms of allowing lots of people to develop apps that work while keeping the core configuration of the phone stable. I am pretty impressed by some of the apps I've seen so far - check out Andrew Mager's list of the top ten apps that came out of last week's iPhone Dev Camp. I've already started using AppMarks. PocketTweets looks good for those of you who are looking to use Twitter from your iPhone.
David Pogue is working on the Missing Manual book for the iPhone and has some great tips up on Favorite iPhone Tricks page.
So far I haven't found battery life to be a problem, though I do plug it in every night, and I admit to being a very light phone talker in general.
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, mobile-devices
So I tried to upgrade this blog to Movable Type 4 this morning. It was all going fine - the install process checked for the needed software and found it, checked my database and said it was fine, and then I got to this screen:
When I pressed that Begin Upgrade button I got this:
And I couldn't get any further. No amount of searching the forums held out any answers, and there hasn't been any response to my filing it as a bug with SixApart. So I've restored back to 3.14 (lucky I backed everything up before starting the process!).
I guess I'll try putting MT4 on a separate installation and see if goes better.
Technorati Tags: blogging, movable-type, MT4
I'm pleased to say that we now have instructions available for configuring iPhones to work with the UW's smtp/imap systems. The instructions are online, linked from our Getting and Setting Up Email Programs page.
The page features photographic screen shots from my iPhone (it sure would be nice to have a better way to get screen shots).
Thanks to Rick Ells, Eugene Sherman, and Andrew Benton for the quick work on this!
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, mobile-devices, email
While walking across Red Square yesterday, I noticed two students using iPhones. Given that it's summer and there were probably a total of about fifteen people in the square at the time, that might be an early indicator of a broader penetration of iPhones this fall than I had been thinking likely.
I spent some time yesterday with Eugene and Rick taking some photos of the iPhone email setup screens to be used in a set of instructions for how to configure the iPhone for use with UW IMAP email. Hopefully those should be in place soon, linked from the Getting and Setting Up Email Programs page. It's too bad there's not a screen capture utility on the iPhone.
So far it looks to me like Bloglines doesn't work very well on the iPhone, but Google Reader does.
Technorati Tags: iphone, apple, mobile-devices
I was shocked and saddened to read on Danah's blog that Peter Lyman died yesterday from cancer.
Peter was the University Librarian at USC in the early '90s, at a time when I was living in DC and looking for what to do next in my life. I interviewed with Peter and John Waiblinger and they offered me a job at USC, which I accepted.
Shortly after I accepted the job, Peter came to DC and we got together to chat. He was heading out to CNRI to meet with Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, and he invited me to come along. He was heading to Dulles after that, and asked if I'd drive to both CNRI and then take him to the airport. He was leaving on some overseas trip, and we soon realized that his huge suitcase and the Miata I was driving would present a challenge. We put the top down on the Miata, and Peter held onto the suitcase balanced on top of the trunk lid while I drove the Dulles toll road to Reston.
I still remember fondly sitting in the room with Peter and the two fathers of the Internet, soaking up the immense amount of intelligence that I was privileged to experience. The link between the library/information folks and the engineers forging the net was beginning to be formed in those early days, and Peter was one of those whose energy and intellect helped create much of what we now know as life on the net.
A week or so after that meeting the USC folks called to say that they had received a massive budget cut so wouldn't be hiring after all, so I never got a chance to work for Peter, which I've always regretted (though he left shortly thereafter to go to Berkeley, and I ended up at the UW a year or so later).
I hadn't seen Peter in a few years, and didn't know he was sick. He'll be sorely missed, though his presence will live on in the work of his students and those he mentored, like Danah.
Technorati Tags: people, peter-lyman
Most of today was spent doing yard work and cleaning house, so not a lot of time to play with the iPhone, but I did manage to forward my Nokia's number to the iPhone. I also moved my contacts and calendar entries from the Nokia to the iPhone by using the Mac sync program over bluetooth from the Nokia to the Mac, and then by syncing contacts and calendar from the Mac to the iPhone in iTunes. That all seemed to work surprisingly well.
