Domo is not a fan of ebooks

Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 – 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it was electronic so I could carry a bunch of books in the space of my PDA. But it was one of the first times I was bitten by digital restrictions management (DRM). I had to reset my PDA because it got into a locked state. After that, I couldn’t read my books until I reauthenticated the PDA. After all, everyone out there is out to destroy authors and steal digital books, so they need to make sure I’m the one who paid for it. This worked the first time around, but the second time I needed to authenticate, the server refused to authenticate the device and I could no longer read the books. So I was out around $20. Imagine buying a regular physical book and then having it no longer work because it wasn’t sure if you were the person who bought it. Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous.

I would be really pissed if I couldn't access this book. Also, most ereaders are currently in b/w making them unsuitable for these types of books.

For the most part, back then we were limited to reading digital books on PDAs or the odd book reading device that only read its own obscure format. And when that company realized that no one wanted to read digital books, you would be stuck with a bunch of locked up files that would only work until your device died. (Maybe less time if it had to regularly phone in) And I disliked reading on the computer because I like to read in bed or while traveling.

A few years ago the Amazon Kindle came out. They licensed the eInk technology that Neal Stephenson had forseen in The Diamond Age and which made it just as easy to read a book on the Kindle as reading a physical book. Three things kept me from buying one. First was the fact that this device, too, used DRM to restrict access to the files. Second, the price was that of a more capable laptop. Third, I couldn’t share books with others. Many of the authors whose new books I buy without reading any reviews are authors I discovered by borrowing a book from a friend or a library. Sharing books is a huge part of our shared American culture. The ability to get a skeptical person to read a new author by allowing them to read your copy for free is a basic idea in the US. Yet publishers are too afraid to allow this to take place. More people need to be like Eric Flint, originator of the Baen Free Library (and an author himself). Here’s a bit of what he writes there:

1. Online piracy — while it is definitely illegal and immoral — is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We’re talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.
2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.
….
After all, Dave Weber’s On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a “loss leader” for Baen’s for-pay experiment “Webscriptions” for months now. And — hey, whaddaya know? — over that time it’s become Baen’s most popular backlist title in paper!
And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.
Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, this was a “gesture of solidarity. “But in most instances, it was because people preferred to read something they liked in a print version and weren’t worried about the small cost — once they saw, through sampling it online, that it was a novel they enjoyed. (Mother of Demons is a $5.99 paperback, available in most bookstores. Yes, that a plug. )
…
Take, for instance, the phenomenon of people lending books to their friends — a phenomenon which absolutely dwarfs, by several orders of magnitude, online piracy of copyrighted books.
What’s happened here? Has the author “lost a sale?”
Well. . . yeah, in the short run — assuming, of course, that said person would have bought the book if he couldn’t borrow it. Sure. Instead of buying a copy of the author’s book, the Wretched Scoundrel Borrower (with the Lender as his Accomplice) has “cheated” the author. Read his work for free! Without paying for it!
The same thing happens when someone checks a book out of a public library — a “transaction” which, again, dwarfs by several orders of magnitude all forms of online piracy. The author only collects royalties once, when the library purchases a copy. Thereafter. . .
Robbed again! And again, and again!
Yet. . . yet. . .
I don’t know any author, other than a few who are — to speak bluntly — cretins, who hears about people lending his or her books to their friends, or checking them out of a library, with anything other than pleasure. Because they understand full well that, in the long run, what maintains and (especially) expands a writer’s audience base is that mysterious magic we call: word of mouth.
Word of mouth, unlike paid advertising, comes free to the author — and it’s ten times more effective than any kind of paid advertising, because it’s the one form of promotion which people usually trust.
That being so, an author can hardly complain — since the author paid nothing for it either. And it is that word of mouth, percolating through the reading public down a million little channels, which is what really puts the food on an author’s table. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.
Think about it. How many people lend a book to a friend with the words: “You ought a read this! It’s really terrible!”
How many people who read a book they like which they obtained from a public library never mention it to anyone? As a rule, in my experience, people who frequently borrow books from libraries are bibliophiles. And bibliophiles, in my experience, usually can’t refrain from talking about books they like.
And, just as important — perhaps most important of all — free books are the way an audience is built in the first place. How many people who are low on cash and for that reason depend on libraries or personal loans later rise on the economic ladder and then buy books by the very authors they came to love when they were borrowing books?

So recently I heard about the Barnes and Noble Nook. Unlike the Kindle, you can share books (although it’s up to the publisher to allow this) and unlike the Kindle you can use the open format EPUB. Now we’re talking. And it’s getting to be within a price range that I might be willing to shell out. So am I about to just start buying ebooks? Well, not quite yet.

First of all, even with the Barnes and Noble Nook, the files are still locked with DRM. Publishers (like the music industry before them) continue to view their readers as adversaries rather than as their clients. They have not taken the lesson from the music industry that legal MP3 sales sky-rocketed once DRM-free tracks were available. Now I don’t know anyone who illicitly obtains music. Before everyone I knew did. And nearly everyone I know illicitly obtains movies because there aren’t DRM-free versions available and I figure the same will happen with books. A quick search online shows that hackers and crackers have already figured out how to break the DRM on Sony and Amazon books. This means that, just as the music industry was doing before, you’re punishing the honest guys while those who would have obtained a copy without paying will still do so. And I refuse to be left holding the bag again with a bunch of books I paid money for and can’t read. I LOVE to support my favorite authors. I WILL pay for books – electronic or otherwise. But I will not be made the fool again.

Second, there’s the matter of Amazon having a little too much power over the Kindle (and perhaps other book reader manufacturers wielding the same power when they also control the store you buy from). You may have seen in the news last year that they removed a book (1984, ironically) from people’s Kindles. That’s right, if the company doesn’t like it (or maybe the government in a country like Iran or China), your books can be remotely removed from your device. This is one of those times where you may be better off with a third party reader like this Viewsonic reader (linke to B&H) where their loyalties are more to you than to a publisher.

Like this....but digital!

Third is the matter of convenience. Books can be read anywhere and anytime. Electronic devices have to be shut off at certain times on airplanes and cannot be brought into some work places. A book can be thrown around casually, but an electronic device cannot. A paperback can be pocket-sized and light – many readers are not.

To see if I can get into electronic books, I have downloaded some books from Cory Doctorow. He provides his books under a creative commons license which allows people to convert his book into every ebook format possible. I also have the Gutenberg project which contains all the classic books for free! I chose to get them on EPUB since it appears to be the book version of the Open Document Format (ODF) that I use with OpenOffice.org. If there’s a compelling reason to use another file format, let me know and I’ll consider it.

I’m at a bit of a disadvantage in that I do not own a book reader or a smart phone. I have my computer and my laptop. But the laptop could have been very useful on a recent train ride. And it can be useful at the airport when there’s power available (my battery doesn’t last long these days). I can even use it in bed – even though it is a bit cumbersome and hot. I installed dropbox on my laptop and main computer so I can keep my library in sync. It won’t be ideal, but it will give me somewhat of a feel for things. I’m using FBReader as it works on Linux and appears to support nearly every format. Who knows, if I can find myself enjoying this non-ideal way to read ebooks, it may inspire me to invest in an ebook reader. All I need now is the reader revolution demanding DRM-free books as they did with MP3s. Make your voices heard!

What kind of books will he end up reading?

Related posts:

1. New Revenue Models
2. I am now a published author!
3. My first published book of photography!

Related posts:

1. Give Me Back My Identity
2. DMCA To be hit with a battering ram
3. Tutorial: Geo-Tagging Your Photos

Firefox is now 5 years old

I can’t believe Firefox has been around for five years!  I remember first being introduced to tabs and it totally changing the way I surf the web.  Back then it was a plucky upstart and didn’t even work with many websites that had been coded specifically for Internet Explorer.  Now it has around 20% market share!

Related posts:

1. Firefox 2.0 releases today!
2. My History with Browsers Part 1: A History Lesson of Sorts
3. Happy Birthday United Nations!

Tetris on Gameboy, the definitive version in my eyes

At first Tetris seems as though it should be the most boring game on Earth, especially to people of my age group.  We hadn’t played Pong or any of the Atari games.  We didn’t start playing games until after the video game crash of 1983.  To us, video games were synonymous with Nintendo.  And I didn’t get the first iteration of Nintendo Entertainment System with that robot either.  (Wow.  We’ve come quite a long way.  The first Nintendo was called the Entertainment System!  And in Japan it was called the Family Computer or Famicom.  Now it’s just the Wii)  For me, video games were Duck Hunt and Mario.  And, a year later Double Dragon and Bubble Bobble.  With the exception of Duck Hunt, these were dynamic games.

As Mario moved from left to right, he encountered new enemies and a changing landscape.  First this little roach thing (I didn’t find out goombas were mushrooms until much later).  Then turtles were added and I had to watch our for the ricochet of the shell.  Then, the next thing I knew, I touched a flower which made me shoot fireballs.  And, I didn’t question it.  That’s one of the magical things about being introduced to video games as a child – a lack of cynicism.  You don’t sit there wondering why touching a flower suddenly gives you the ability to shoot fireballs from your … pockets?  It always looked to me like he was taking them out of his pockets.  The instruction manual had told us to expect this.  There was no joking about mushrooms and Mario being high.  We didn’t wonder how Mario wasn’t burning his hands with the fireballs.  In fact, until my grandfather came over, I had never really thought about the reality of the game.  Forever the joker, he asked me, “How doesn’t he get a headache, hitting his head on those blocks?”  And I didn’t have an answer.  And from then on, my brother and I would say “ouch” when he hit his head on the blocks.  (Although I later found out he was hitting it with his hand, you just had to look very, very close and you could see the pixels above his hat)  When I hit the invincibility star, I laughed with glee as I could run into every creature and ended up running off a cliff.

With Double Dragon, the foot soldiers were pretty generic at first, but there were weapons to pick up like chains and bats.  And there were different techniques for different bad guys.  And Bubble Bobble had a succession of colourful levels – each with a different technique needed to beat it.  And it kept tacking on different baddies until we had seen them all and then they were combined in various ways.

Tetris was the exact opposite of any of these games.  There was one screen.  It looked like a well and it filled with seven different pieces.  You lose if the pieces reach the top.  I’m convinced if Tetris were developed today, you would start off in level one with only square pieces, just to make sure you understand what to do.  And a popup would appear telling you to make a line across the screen.  And if you put a square on top of another, it would remind you that you needed to make a line across the bottom.  And you’d have to unlock the pieces before you could use them – to make sure you knew how to use it!  And multiplayer wouldn’t be playable until you beat the game on one player first.  (I’m looking at you Warioware!)  So it’s a wonderful thing that Tetris was developed in the early days before all this handholding.

The tetrominoes would fall for an infinite length of time in game type A.  (Not really, but it certainly seemed this way)  Every ten lines the pieces would fall a little faster.  And the bits come randomly, but I’m convinced the game was programmed to provide way too many squares and far fewer straight lines.  The gameplay is so easy to understand.  And there are the score bonuses for clearing more than one line at once, but I never saw a point unless I was playing with someone else.  In a big way, it was this extreme simplicity – the fact that there was only one “level” that made Tetris the game I always went back to.  I like puzzle games in general, but I don’t play most of them as often as I play Tetris.  And I think it’s because when you have a game with many different levels or boards, it allows one to be a favorite.  And when you have a favorite level, you want to play that level over and over.  But then you get bored of that level.  And for some reason this boredom only emerges in games where there are different levels.  With Tetris there is only one level, so I know I don’t have the choice to pick another and I don’t get bored.  It’s somewhat similar to what happens when I tried to pick music to listen to back when I used Windows Media Player.  I had to look for songs and make a playlist and I always played the same songs and I would get sick of them.  But it was such a hassle to go through all my music to find the songs I like.  With Rhythmbox and other music players that ape the iTunes metaphor, all of my music is there.  As I listen to songs I rate them.  Then I create a smart playlist containing all the songs rated above a certain level.  And I listen to that on random and I enjoy that and never seem to get bored of it.

My original Tetris-playing hardware

I wonder how others see Tetris?  Do they see it as a metaphor for construction or destruction?  I always imagined I was I was on a crane lowering these pieces towards the bottom in order to build a skyscraper.  Whenever a line was cleared, it was just scrolling up a little  higher so you could see where the next piece would go.  It doesn’t work perfectly as a metaphor, but it’s what I constructed for myself.  After all, Tetris doesn’t have any kind of story at all – it is the anti-game in today’s world where everyone has to have a purpose in the game.  But in this game you are simply manipulating block and there’s no avatar and no point to it all.  I was told by someone else that they saw Tetris as a game where you were blowing up a building every time you got a line across the entire screen.

Tetris was, of course, the ultimate two player game at the time.  It was one of the few two player games that allowed for direct competition.  Most other games either had a two player indifferent mode like Super Mario Bros or a cooperative mode like Double Dragon, Bubble Bobble, or Contra.  Now, I never understood the idea behind having a two player mode in Super Mario Bros.  I guess the point was to compete on score?  Because for the most part I consider multiplayer games to exist because it’s mostly boring to watch someone else play a game (most of the time).  But if you have to take turns watching each other play, what’s the point?  At least in Super Mario Bros. 3 you get to divide up the work load and launch the Mario Bros. mini-game.  But with Tetris, especially on the Gameboy, you could engage in a challenge.

Remember, this was back in the old days before the Internet existed (as far as people outside of universities knew) so you had to play with someone local.  This was the main reason we lobbied my mother for a Gameboy for Dan.  Then you’d take your cable and hook up the Gameboys and play away.  There was something great about being able to give a bunch of lines to the other player when you got a double, triple, or tetris.  My brother and I would euphemistically refer to it as “giving a present”.  “Ya like your present?” was a common taunt.  And “No Indian givers” or some such taunt if the person sent it back to us.  I still get a lot of joy out of this when I play modern versions of Tetris.  It was just an extra special joy back then.

And this is one of the interesting aspects of Tetris that made it unique among multiplayer games.  A game of Tetris ends when one player dies.  At first this sounds just like any other game – like Street Fighter or Double Dragon’s two player vs mode.  You attack the person and then they die and you win.  But Tetris is profoundly different.  In Tetris you are not actively hurting the opponent.  You are merely adding to their burden.  In other words, by you doing your best at clearing the screen, you are attacking the other player.  In a way, Tetris is the ultimate passive-aggressive game.  “Oh, did I just send you 12 lines?  I didn’t notice, I was just trying to clear the screen to make it easier for me to play.”

Tetris is also unique in that it works equally well as a single player game and a multiplayer game.  Most games work better in some modes than others.  Bomberman, for example, feels empty when playing it against the computer.  There’s something that just works right about setting up a bomb right in your opponent’s face and then getting to laugh at him right there.  When playing with the computer you just feel like you’re playing against a soulless AI that can “cheat” or display a huge lack of intelligence.  And Super Mario Bros really only functions as a one player game.  But with Tetris it works as both a one player and a two player game.  I think part of the biggest reason for this is that when you are playing Tetris in one player mode, you aren’t playing against a computer opponent – you’re playing against yourself.  And what feels better than outdoing yourself?  And there’s also a joy in beating a friend.  As I mentioned above, playing against someone is both an incidental effect of playing well on your own screen and being malicious by, say, lining up two tetrises in a row.

Tetris was always my boredom killer.  I had about 10 or so games for the Gameboy, more than I would have for any system until I was an adult.  But whenever I was at the doctor’s office or in the car on a boring trip, I’d pop in Tetris.  It never seemed to get old.  Except for five minutes of nostalgia every now and then, I have not played Super Mario Bros since Mario Bros All Stars came out on the Super Nintendo.  The same goes for all the games of that era.  I installed Bubble Bobble on my Wii and Dan and I beat the whole game in a night and I haven’t touched it since.  But Tetris is different.

I have tried to acquire Tetris for every system I have owned.  We were extremely agitated that it never came out for Gamecube in the USA.  There was some weird version that messed with Tetris so much that we returned it to the store within an hour of buying it.  And that’s part of the madness of Tetris.  Although Tetris is the perfect game and has been since its inception, people have tried to tack on extra functionality every few years.  And more often than not, it doesn’t get well received.  I thought, for example that the bombs in Tetris 2 were completely unnecessary.  (Consider yourself lucky if you’re too young or old to remember that)  So I was very happy when Tetris came out on the Wii downloadable games.  There were tons of unnecessary Tetris games included and I only played those once and concluded I didn’t give a crap about it.  But, I was elated that there was a mode with pure, unadulterated Tetris.  Of course, I always turn off all the stupid little add-ons they felt it necessary to add.  I want to beat my opponent simply because I was faster at making tetrises and able to keep myself from reaching the top of the screen.  I don’t want to win because I made the other player’s pieces suddenly fall extremely fast.

Dan and I decided to both review Tetris at the same time without having read each other’s versions first to see how we would both cover the same game.  See his version here.
If you want to see what a cheesy commercial for Tetris that’s “got bombs in it!”, check out this Tetris 2 commercial from the 1990s.

Want to play?

Related posts:

1. A Review of New Super Mario Brothers Wii
2. Age of Empires III
3. Mario Galaxy

My first ever Geo-tagged Photo

(I originally wrote most of this on Thursday, 21 May)

I can’t explain to you the thrill and excitement I get from geo-tagging my photos.  I don’t mean that the thrill is so large as to defy explanation; rather that I can’t articulate what it is about geo-tagging my photos that excites me so much.  Perhaps it’s the fascination of two different technologies coming together.  Maybe it’s the age-old excitement of being able to point to a map and say “I was there!”, only this time you have the EXACT coordinates and you have photographic proof.  All I know is that ever since I resolved to get a GPS device to work with my cameras, I’ve been anxious to get my hands on the device.  Officially, it’s an anniversary gift from my wife, and I think it will be one of the ones I enjoy the most.

Originally I was going to buy the JOBO photoGPS but it had lots of marks against it.  First of all, it resides in the camera’s flash hot shoe.  This means that 1) I cannot use flash when geo-tagging my photos and 2) I cannot geo-tag my point and shoot photographs.  Not only this, but second, most people online complained that it was very loose on Canon cameras and was always falling off or in danger of doing so.  Then it was featured on Digital Photography School. Almost no one liked it and everyone mentioned just getting a regular GPS reciever and syncing the track files.  Nearly everyone recommended Geosetter for syncing the track files.  I did some searching and eventually came across Jeffry Friedl’s blog.  He has an awesome photoblog documenting his living and travels in Japan.  Jeff uses the Garmen Legend eTrex Hcx .  After reading his review, I knew that was the device for me.

My GPS unit

Another geo-tagged photo from the same outing.

Related posts:

1. Tutorial: Geo-Tagging Your Photos
2. Hawaii Day 2
3. The New Coney Island and The Cyclone

There’s something about this little, brown, cube monster that people love.  I first came across Domo when chatting on AIM with my high school friend, Lawrence Kwan.  He had it as his buddy icon.  I asked him what the brown square with the mouth was and he directed me to a website with an animation.  I didn’t really get it.  But there was something neat about the little guy.  Then, all of a sudden, I see him all over the place for Target’s Halloween in-store decorations.  (I wish I’d taken a photo)  There’s something people love about the little guy.  On flickr there are, as of this writing, nine groups featuring Domo.

These photos are from my brother’s photostream.  Follow along on Domo’s adventures in Dan’s set The Chronicles of the Traveling Domo.

Related posts:

1. More Flickr Hacking
2. History Meme
3. Surprises in Flickr Views

In the rear photo, where I show the connections you can get a true feel for the size by comparing it to my hand.

First of all, you can see that the engineers at Roku have made some pretty good engineering decisions.  This little device will basically work with any television made in the last 10-15 years.  It has every type of connection you could imaging – Component, Composite, S-Video, HDMI and analog and digital audio.  So you know that if you buy this little guy you can use him on all your TVs from now until…well, Netflix will probably go out of business or stop offering Instant View because your TVs can’t connect with the Roku box.  You can also see that it has an ethernet connection, but I use it wirelessly.  That way I can easily move it around the house to watch programs in the bedroom or living room.

So, how well does it perform?  First of all, at this point in time I only have SD TVs so I don’t know how good the HD quality is.  However, I have to say that it works very, very good for me.  It is important for me to mention that I am on Comcast Cable Internet.  I think it’s about 6 Mbps download rate, but I’m not sure.  I’m on the lowerest tier they have in Anne Arundel County.  My router is a couple of years old, so it’s a 100 Mbps router with 802.11 b/g.  I have it setup with WPA.  My TVs are 27+ inches.  Ok, so how well does it perform?  If I had a continuum where on on end we have internet-quality videos and at the other end we have red ray, standard DVD quality, the Roku is a 7.5 on average.  You notice it most in black/dark areas.  I’d have to say that 99% of the time, the quality of the footage according to the Roku box is 4/4 so this is as good as it gets in standard def.  I almost never have any problems with buffering despite watching wirelessly.  In fact, I think maybe ONCE there was a buffering issue.

So is it a good buy?  If you have a Netflix Unlimited Plan there is only one reason not to buy the Roku box.  You have some other device that will play Netflix content.  Examples include Xbox 360 with a Gold Plan and some Blu Ray players.  This has really increased the amount of Netflix content I can watch by nearly an order of magnitude.  So while my discs are in the post, I can watch other content.  There’s also a LOT of Starz and Showtime Original content on there.  Really, the thing that keeps the Roku box from being the best thing since the Internet is the fact that Netflix apparently either doesn’t have the server power to have their entire catalog digitized or they are operating under some draconian licensing because a lot of the new stuff isn’t available and some items (even old movies) become unavailable; otherwise the Roku box would kill your [Comcast, Verizon, etc] OnDemand service.

Related posts:

1. Getting Rid of Cable
2. Why the TV and Movie Companies have it so wrong
3. Joining the Digital Television Revoultion (but not through Cable)

But I never stopped to think about what motivated people to create this program of which there are already hundreds.  I just always assumed it was an ego thing – so it would be a program THEY created.  Alternatively, I also recognized there is SOME scope for a few different players.  For example, what if you hate Mono?  Then you won’t want Banshee.  So it’s nice to have Rhythmbox.  Or maybe you run KDE and don’t want to have to load the GTK libraries so it’s nice to have Amarok.  And if you want to jam out, but don’t want to have such a high memory footprint you can run xmms.  Or, if you’re one of the spartans who shuns the GUI there’s mpg123.  But after that why create another?

Recently an alternative reason for creating the umpteenth thing came to me.  Perhaps people are just doing it to scratch a programming itch.  Ever since I learned my first modern programming language (ie not BASIC), I’ve wanted to write a program.  After all, my head is fully of knowledge of these great programming languages and I want to create something.  It’s like having the impulse to write when you first learn what words are for.  I was taught Java at university and I’ve taught myself Perl, Python, C, C++, C# and PHP.  As I work through the book, tutorial or HW I create all of these toy programs.  They do silly things like calculate the area of a square or keep track of the stats of cats (to demonstrate OOP).  When I’m done I want to create something useful!  I want to make something that I can share with people and they’ll say, “Well, that’s rather neat.  I never knew a computer could solve that problem for me.”  But what hasn’t already been created?

Sure, I’ve written myself a few bash scripts, python programs, and Perl scripts, but those were for very narrow problems I needed solved.  So far only Pydvdauthor has been general enough to share with others on freshmeat.  Some people here and there have downloaded it.  But even this program has 3 or 4 other programs in the same category.  I only created mine because I didn’t need to futz about with DVD Menus.  I just wanted the videos to have chapters.

Take another example – GnomeDO is really just a fancy alt-F2.  Avant Window Navigator is just a cool looking version of the task bar – which we’ve had for ages.  So there really isn’t anything NEW to be made.  It’s just people scratching an itch.  And people take all that already exists and perhaps they combine it in a new way.  Do we need another music program?  No.  But what if you took it an combined it with a web browser a la Songbird.  Well, technically Amarok was already doing this via KParts.  But Songbird adds some other features here and there.  And maybe they could have added them to Amarok or Banshee or xmms.  But these guys were already the ones behind Winamp.  They could have turned Winamp into Songbird – but they wanted to try something different and flex some different coding muscles.

Related posts:

1. Monkey Business
2. Programming to the Rescue: Amortization Automation
3. My first project on Freshmeat!

Got my Neuros OSD today via UPS!  w00t w00t!  I’ve been lusting after this since it was featured in Linux Format Magazine last month.  (or was it two months ago?)  I unpacked the contents and skimmed through the quick start guide.  Then I hooked it up in my bedroom and connected it to the ethernet network.
They have a neat little opening animation about how Neuros is about open technology.  Unlike other companies that build on open source technologies (I’m looking at you TiVo), the guys at Neuros Technology are proud of this and are using it to their advantage.  In fact, they have a few Google Summer of Code projects working on improving the firmware – free engineering hours.  That’s one of the benefits of open source.  Another benefit is that someone like me (or, more likely, someone with lots of programming chops) can take the hardware they’ve developed and then tweak the code to make it do whatever they want.

I was dumped onto the main menu.  The first thing I did was try to update the firmware.  However, despite the unit saying it had an IP address, it wouldn’t work.  So I kept going through the settings dialog, clicking into each one to make changes and set the date and time and so forth.  Eventually I came to “guided setup” and that setup the ethernet connection and looked for the updates.  I then began the updates process.  It took a long time…like on the order of five or more minutes.  During the update, the Neuros OSD plays a game of pong with itself.  I think it would have been neat if I could play pong vs the compute while it upgraded, alas it’s not to be.

I’m pretty excited about seeing if it can see my MythTV recordings easily (the reason why I bought the Neuros OSD in the first place) or if I’ll have to do some tweaking.  I know, from the developer forums, that it doesn’t have MythTV-specifically integrated, but it does support uPNP which MythTV does as well.  I’ve brought to the developers’ attentions the code that the Gnome programmers used to get MythTV to work with Totem via the plugin.  One of them gave it a quick look and decided that it would potentially be pretty easy to get MythTV officially working with the Neuros OSD, but probably not in the near future as the engineers are busy working on the Arizona firmware.

Finally!  It rebooted and went through it’s Power of Openness and Freedom speech again.  I guess this is why they recommend never turning off the neuros?  I tried playing an OGG file off of one of my machines and it appeared to freeze up the Neuros.  I guess I won’t be doing that again.  Ok…power cycle.  Yeah, I try pressing buttons and the power freedom thing doesn’t seem skippable.  I guess it’s covering up the boot time.

Before I do MythTV, I try an MPG from the same machine.  It plays!  It plays a little haltingly, but it’s reading over the network then off of a USB drive.  So this gives me hope for the MythTV videos working.

I enable the uPNP browser.  No items to list.  I guess I probably need to get something working in MythTV, although I’m not sure what.  I go into more Applications and find the YouTube browser.  It works pretty darned well.  I’m able to watch youtube videos without any problems or lag.

——-

And now here are my impressions after having had it since then.  It works very well for digitizing videos.  I used it to get rid of nearly all of my VHS tapes and I’m pretty happy with the results.  However, it has completely failed at the one thing I wanted it to do when I bought it – serve as a MythTV frontend.  I was able to somewhat hack that together by enabling Samba on my MythTV backend.  However, a lot of the videos didn’t play well.  Also, there is a lot of non-TV stuff in there too, such as the JPEGs associated with each video.  It was way too cumbersome to use.  Until Neuros comes out with a patch that properly connects to MythTV, it will just gain dust in the corner of my computer room.

Related posts:

1. The Neuros OSD
2. Some more Fedora 7 impressions
3. Getting Totem’s MythTV plugin to work

Flash has been around since the dial-up days when most people would get mixed feelings when they came upon a flash website. We knew it would take orders of magnitude longer to load than an HTML website, but it would also look really cool. But Microsoft is once again playing catchup. This time, however, they are using their huge bank accounts to make it look like a really good idea to use Silverlight. Many of the Olympics websites were available in Silverlight. Not only does this get Silverlight into the vernacular during a huge event, but it also gets it installed onto tons of people’s computers. These people might have otherwise skipped websites that required them to install yet another plugin.

Having Silverlight used on such a massive event like the Olympics also helps MS help to convince people who switched to Macs that they are on the wrong platform. After all, all they have to do is release a new version of Silverlight and not release it to the Macs on the same day. Bam, people start jonesing for Windows again.

This brings us to Moonlight, Novell, and Miguel de Icaza. Miguel works at Novell. Novell signed the pact with Microsoft that caused them to become radioactive to a certain portion of the free software community. Not only did it seem like an admission of guilt from Novell, but it also creates two classes of Linux users. Novell users, who are protected from MS lawsuits and everyone else. (Not that I believe for a second that MS has a leg to stand on with those lawsuits) So the first sin Miguel has committed (in the public eye) is to be working at Novell.

Second, he helped to create Mono. Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .net framework and the main C# interpreter in Linux. There are quite a few reasons why people don’t like this. C# is an example of Microsoft’s embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. It’s basically a bootlegged version of Java because they couldn’t get anyone to use their jacked up version of Java. Why they couldn’t just play nice with Sun is beyond me. They have such a need to control. Reminds me of Apple and the iPhone. So C# is a Microsoft creation. However, it is an ECMA standard (and maybe an ISO standard) so C# isn’t patent-encumbered. .Net, on the other hand, is a MS technology which is full of patents. People fear that MS could one day sue Linux distributions for including Mono because it infringes on their patents. Thus, there are some that have taken to uninstalling all traces of Mono from their distributions. Is this a rational fear? I don’t know. I’ve read stuff that says it is and stuff that says it isn’t. I really like Tomboy and Beagle.

So now Miguel and Novell have created Moonlight – an open source version of Silverlight. This is what has lots and lots of people mad and talking about it. Microsoft has been really, really (uncharacteristically) nice when it comes to Moonlight. They have been providing the Novell team with reference specifications, test suites to ensure compatibility, and binary codecs. Previous MS technologies which have been reverse engineered like CIFS and Pre-2007 Office formats have have no help from MS. So should people be worried?

I guess it all comes down to intention. Why is Microsoft being so nice? How can it backfire? Miguel has been making a very reasonable argument recently. He has been saying that we don’t want Linux users to get left behind again. It took us a long time to get proper Flash support and because of that we couldn’t properly experience some of the web. So why not work together with MS to ensure we can view the inevitable websites created with Silverlight. Seems perfectly reasonable. After all, if Joe Blow decides to make his website with Silverlight, we shouldn’t necessarily boycott his website. Perhaps it’s all he knows how to do. Now lets look at the worst case scenario. Microsoft helps Linux and Mac out by providing Silverlight. “Look,” they say to web developers, “this will work on everyone’s computer and you can do all these cool things.” More and more web developers use it where they would use Flash. Eventually you can’t get on the web without using Silverlight. Then they decide to suddenly stop helping Linux and Mac. Now what? I doubt they would sue us. That’s really the least of our problems. It’s that once again someone helped MS get to the top when they were having problems and then when they achieved dominance, they left everyone else behind.

Have they ever done this before? Sure – providing Internet Explorer for Macintosh then suddenly abandoning it once they had soundly defeated Netscape.

So, what’s the final verdict? What should we do? Generally speaking, I happen to be a computing realist. Although I rip all of my CDs to OGG Vorbis, I have MP3 decoders on my Linux computers because the Amazon format is MP3. I have videos in mpeg, avi and other non-OGG theora formats. I’m able to view the non-OGG video formats on more computers and they encode much more quickly. I use Adobe’s Flash instead of Gnu Gnash because I want my web pages to work correctly. Finally, I use nVidia’s Linux drivers because I want to have the full functionality of my graphics card whether it’s for something frivolous like Compiz or some 3D computer game. And, I do not have any problems with using Mono on my computer. Although I’m not a huge fan of MS, I don’t see how Mono could hurt me. C# is usable by anyone and if Microsoft decides to stop cooperating with .Net, there’s nothing that says we have to continue compatibility. We can just continue with our own version which is optimized for Linux.

With Moonlight, I am a bit more hesitant. Microsoft has a horrible track record of stabbing people in the back. I don’t want to help them once again achieve hegemony on the web and muck about with the standards again. I want sites to be viewable to everyone whether or not they choose to buy a Windows computer. If they choose to exercise their right to use Mac, Linux, BeOS, AmigaOS, Haiku, or BSD, they should also have the right to access the information on the Internet. I think for now I will keep Moonlight off of my Linux computers and even Silverlight off of my Windows computers. Hopefully, I will never need it for some website I love and, therefore, will never install it.

Related posts:

1. More Updates on the Novell and Microsoft Deal
2. Novell Sells out….
3. Loss of my first Linux box

Related posts:

1. Late Happy 15th Birthday Linux!
2. Happy Birthday Firefox!
3. Happy Birthday!

In my first look at the micro-blogs I had some pretty good feelings about Twitter. That has basically carried over for the past few weeks. I added a Twitter plugin to my blog, using it for quick thoughts I don’t want to elaborate on with a blog post. I’m also using Twitux on my Linux computer for posting without having to load up the Twitter site. I haven’t really been using the Flock Twitter plugin because it doesn’t seem to update correctly or often enough. I’m enjoying using it for those quick thoughts. I’m definitely going to keep using Twitter for the foreseeable future.  So I feel the way about Twitter as I did a month ago – I like it.

Now onto Pownce.  I have barely used Pownce.  I’ve made perhaps somewhere between 15 and 20 posts and that’s about it.  I think part of the problem is that everyone I know is on Twitter or will be on Twitter in the near future, but no one I know or care about is on Pownce.  I mean, even NPR’s Talk of the Nation is on Twitter.  The reply feature is nice, but so far I haven’t been able to use it since no one is following me on Pownce.  I haven’t had a chance to use the fileshare or calendar features I was excited about in my review a month ago since I don’t know anyone on this service.  I may keep updating it for a little while, but if that account lapsed and they canceled my account, I wouldn’t care.  I’m also using a WordPress Plugin for Pownce and it looks exactly like the one for Twitter.  Just like a month ago, I am not that fond of Pownce.

Finally, onto Plurk.  I think Plurk was the Internet addiction I was quickest to get over.  Previous addictions include Facebook and Flickr.  I have met a lot of people on Plurk that seem to be pretty neat people to talk to.  There’s also a huge knitting in the Plurk constituency.  At least, everyone I click on from the “interesting plurkers” links appears to be into knitting.  It’s a pointless fact, but a strange one.  Plurk was a very interesting ride when compared to last month’s review.  The action items in Plurk turned out not to bother me that much and I eventually came to like them and tried to always format my answer in the third person.  And, there was the option to pick a blank option and just put whatever you wanted in there.  So instead of annoying me, it ended up forcing me to be creative.  I didn’t like that there was only a line for typing – but the line dynamically becomes a box if you type more in.  I was also excited about the karma.

So, interesting, the karma did what it was supposed to do at first – get me to come back and do lots of commenting on other people’s plurks.  It also got me to befriend a bunch of people.  But then the karma ended up getting me more and more pissed off.  Now I’m at the point where the karma is actually what is causing me to consider just getting rid of Plurk.  I absolutely had the feeling that I’m being forced to Plurk.  I’ve never liked people forcing me to do things and I’ve always left any organization where I had to be forced to do something.  The most annoying part is they expect you to plurk from work instead of actually working.  At a lot of jobs, like mine, this is against the computer policy and people have been fired over it.  So every day when I got home, my karma had gone lowered.  This was made even more annoying by the fact that you get more abilities on the site as you get more karma.  Also, if the others are right, then by not using smilies and dancing bananas, I’m limiting my karmic growth.  I don’t want to be forced to use smilies if I don’t feel like it.

Also, as more and more people did more and more plurking, it became harder to keep up if I took some time off to spend with my family or others in the real world.  I would come back and find hundreds of plurks for me to look over.  If I don’t look them over, it’s hard for me to find replies to my most recent plurks.  So they need to somehow fix that – I can’t think of the best way to do it right now, but it certainly doesn’t work well.  People are constantly claiming plurk bankruptcy.  Also, when I’m skipping through these hundreds of plurks it makes me feel bad that I’m not reading what others are saying, but I expect them to read my plurks and respond so we can have a conversation.

So, in the end, I really enjoy Twitter – the original.  Pownce is just there and I haven’t found a compelling reason to stay with it.  Plurk has annoyed me so much with the karma and bad reply interface that I’m thinking of quitting it.  I’ve been purposely boycotting it for the past 48+ hours and just spending time in the real world instead of the 20+ minutes it’s going to take me to get through all the replies.  I may go back to Plurk, but I’d probably just end up ignoring the karma.

Related posts:

1. Micro-blogging: 2 years later…
2. A Macro-blog Post about Micro-blogging
3. Identi.ca, the free software micro-blogging platform

But a few little factors have led me to check out this whole micro-blogging thing.

1) I’ve recently been getting my blog syndicated in digg and LinuxToday and figured perhaps I should save my blog for longer posts so that people don’t have an uneven experience with the blog. In short, small posts look bad.

2) I resisted podcasts for a long time and regret it. I’ve been very entertained and learned a lot from the podcasts I’ve been listening to. I wish I started a long time ago.

3) I’ll try anything legal at least once.

4) I have this sense that perhaps I’m missing out on a form of communication that I may end up loving.

5) I’ve already been doing it with Facebook via the status updates. Ever since they changed my profile page so that it logs all of the past status updates, it’s basically become a micro-blog of sorts.

So I’ve decided to do a review of the main micro-blogging services: Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and Plurk. I’ll sign up for all of them (if possible) and see which one works for me. In the end I’ll keep accounts on one or two of them and delete the others (or let them languish to be deleted when the service does its periodic purges). Here’s what I know and the preconceptions I come to to table with.

Twitter – All I know about Twitter is that it’s the most famous and the one that “everyone” is on. Also, it’s “always” down. At least, every single thing I read about Twitter on the net references how it’s always down. When I checked Wikipedia, it says that in 2007 it had a 97% uptime or 3 days offline. Of course, that could have been written in Wikipedia by a Twitter employee or Twitter enthusiast. It certainly doesn’t seem like a lot of downtime in a year consisting of 365 days. Either people on the Internet are engaging in hyperbole by saying that Twitter is “always” down (that would NEVER happen on the nets!) or the Wikipedia article is wrong. I guess I’ll find out during my review.

Jaiku – All I know about Jaiku is that it was created by some Finnish dudes and Google recently bought it.

Pownce – What I know about Pownce is that it was created by Kevin Rose of digg fame. Other than that all I know is that no one ever talks about Pownce. Is it under a Fight Club-like silence? Does this mean that no one uses it? Or are they just too new to the party? Everyone’s always talking about Twitter.

Plurk – I know absolutely nothing about Plurk. Well, I read an article about how “everyone” is deserting Twitter for Plurk. I think micro-blogging is still in an early phase and people are just afraid of being on the service that all their friends aren’t one.

I think I’ll go through the sign-up process and what the websites say about the services. Then I’ll blog my first experience making a post. After that I’ll probably do either another post that will focus on how I feel about them or I will do one post per service. Ok, so first up is the “original” – Twitter!

Twitter

Twitter has the most bubbly, Web 2.0 vogue site of them all. See for yourself!

Let’s see what they say for the why:

Why? Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely.

• Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know.
• Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful.

Partying? Your friends may want to join you.

So, it looks like they’re encouraging that inane babble that everyone complains about with their twitter accounts. Still, they have a sense of humor and that’s always a good thing in a company. What about the how…Nothing of substance there. Ok…. The following quote appears randomly on the home page:

If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, it is one of those things, like MySpace, that sounds totally ridiculous and stupid when you first hear about it. But once you start using it, you realize how much fun it is.

Eric Nuzum, Author of The Dead Travel Fast

That’s pretty much exactly how I feel about micro-blogging. But let’s see if I really do find it fun once I start. They have a video and I decide to watch it. Definitely watch the video. It really explains where they expect to fit in your online life. They want to fill in the space between blogs and emails. Good point. This is something I’m looking to do. Perhaps it’s a good match for me? At least the case for micro-blogging has been made, although I’m not sure if I want to do it on Twitter. Of course, I even if I like Twitter, if the Internets are to be believed and everyone had started the exodus, then the value goes way down. In fact, I’m a bit worried after I watched the video. My enjoyment of the site seems to be predicated on the fact that my friends are on. I don’t have that many technologically minded friends. Those that do follow technology, like my brother Dan, tend to eschew sites like Twitter. Oh well. I’ll sign up.

Well, djotaku, my preferred online nom de guerre, was available. In an interesting move, it asks for permission to search your email contacts to find out if your friends are already using it. Interestingly, my brother was listed as using it. When I mentioned to him that I didn’t get Twitter, he didn’t mention having an account. It then asked if I wanted to send invites to others. I picked few friends.

Well, here’s my Twitter page, or at least the page it dumped me to when the sign-up was over.

Well, Twitter’s up right now despite what the detractors say. It’s pretty easy to use. Flock also has some Twitter integration, but that’s a post for another day. Here’s my page after a few updates and my brother’s page:

Well, this micro-blogging thing is a bit fun! Also, it’s pretty darned easy. If I had a text messaging plan I might even update it more often. Wikipedia mentions a famous case where it saved someone’s life.

Next I decided to give Jaiku a shot.

Jaiku

Here’s the main page:

I decided to “take the tour”. Then I clicked on “explore”:

I can’t sign up for it now. I need to request an invite. You know what Google, this whole “invitation-only” BS is starting to get on my nerves. I think I’ll pass on Jaiku. So next up is Pownce.

Pownce

While Twitter seems to emphasize nice short messages about what you’re doing, Pownce appears to be attempting to be even more than that. Here’s the main page:

Pownce seems to really emphasize sharing stuff (vs updating people on your life). Twice on the site it has a variation on:

Pownce is a way to keep in touch with and share stuff with your friends. Send people files, links, events, and messages and then have real conversations with the recipients.

I like the idea of being able to send files and events. It takes a lot of the tedium out of having to email attachments and deal with all that. Plus the events part sounds useful. I get a weird vibe from Pownce. I like something about Twitter a lot more. Perhaps it’s the color scheme? I don’t know, but something about Pownce almost has a sinister feel to it. Maybe it’s the name Pownce? I keep thinking of Pownage and dominating people. It sounds really aggressive. Anyway, I’m going to sign-up.

It also has a friend import feature. Unfortunately, the site became incredibly slow and unresponsive at this stage. Pownce is also built into Flock, so if I like it, it will continue to be convenient for me to use. Here’s the main page for me to enter my posts:

Interestingly, they appear to think people will be willing to pay for Pownce. People are always talking about how to monetize the read/write web (Web 2.0) and how there are all these companies providing services that are nice, but people wouldn’t pay for them. I pay for flickr because it gives me value – I can post more pictures, have a higher upload limit, and have access to all my pictures. But paying for a microblogging service? Of all the reasons they list to go pro, only the 250 MB limit appears to be worth it. But it depends, if that’s per file, then who’s sending files that big? If it’s total, then maybe it’s worth the money. Well, let’s try out Pownce.

I tried to make a post and it keeps “freezing” on me. I click post and then it returns me to a completely blank – white – page. I finally get a post, and it expresses my frustration.

I’m also going to test adding a file and and event.

There’s one thing I like so far with Pownce – each post has a reply button. If the replies are kept with the original posts then I think Pownce has a one-up on Twitter. It means you can truly have a conversation with your buddies. So you’re combining micro-blogging with micro-commenting. Being able to share files sounds good, but I don’t know how often I’d use it. Alright, all that’s left is Plurk.

Plurk

As I said before, all I know about Plurk is that it’s supposedly eating Twitter’s lunch. (Drinking their milkshake, if you will) Here’s the main page:

Honestly, based on the front page, I’m least excited about trying out Plurk. The front page screens out – “I’m trying too hard”. I don’t know. I just don’t think it’s as inviting as Twitter or Pownce. Well, let’s sign up and see if my opinion changes. This also had a friend finding/recruiting phase. I guess they all recognize how these services aren’t any fun without friends on them. Here’s the page it dumped me into.

The page is interesting, but it feels a bit cluttered.

The timeline idea is interesting and different, but also a bit unnecessary. After all, all the post on your page in Pownce and Twitter are listed in reverse chronological order anyway. Also, I’m used to seeing lists in reverse chronological order, but not timelines. It took me a few seconds to realize that my post had appeared on the left and not the right. Before I keep going, let me say they have a weird and disturbing mascot/logo:

It looks like a little puppy with its head cut off!

Anyway, another thing I don’t like about Plurk is that the posting interface is like facebook where it’s in the form of “username” action “something”. I find this to be more limiting than Twitter and Pownce where I can just type freeform. Here’s the items you can pick for your action:

But what do I like about Plurk? I like that it says it’s (time) and blah. I also think the karma points could be an interesting concept. Going back to stuff I don’t like, I don’t like that it’s a line for me to type in. Even though I only get 140 characters like in Twiter, I feel like I can’t say that much because it’s a text line instead of a text box and the font is so huge. I know I can keep typing, but I feel like I need to end by the time I get to the end of the text box.

Ok, so – conclusions? I’m willing to try these suckers out for a few weeks and see how I like them. I’m already semi-addicted to changing my Facebook status and today I couldn’t wait to get out of bed to make a Twitter post (known as a Tweet). So I may end up liking micro-blogging. The only part of the micro-blogging culture that doesn’t call to me is the whole updated from your cell phone. Not only do I not have a text messaging plan, but (to borrow a term from the intel guys) it’s bad OPSEC. In other words, if you’re Twittering how much fun you’re having at a concert, then people know you’re not at home. They can rob you, kidnap your kids, rape your wife, etc. That’s why I never blog about my vacations until I get back.

Anyway, stay tuned and see how this experiment goes and which service I end up favoring.

Related posts:

1. Micro-blogging: 2 years later…
2. Micro-blogging: One Month Later
3. Identi.ca, the free software micro-blogging platform

Check it out, here.

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1. Twitter-like Post: A look into Cornell’s Past
2. Twitter-like Post: Uninstalling BitTorrent
3. Charitable Donations for 2008

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