Blogarithms

I love this little WiFi radio I received just yesterday from C. Crane. Sure, I could just as easily use one of my computers to listen to any of the nearly 50,000 audio streams listed on Reciva.com, but I’d have to install a Real player to get many of them, and given Real’s history of annoying software, that’s something I’m not willig to do. Besides, there’s just something nice about having a separate device. I guess my old brain just thinks it’s radio because it comes from something that looks like one. I like that I can just turn it off and on again, and after the requisite few seconds of “buffering…”, I’m listening to one of my favorite stations. No application to start. No window to move around on my monitor. Just a box with familiar knobs and buttons.

Again, nothing revolutionary about the content, but I’ve already re-connected with Stan Dunn and others who now produce In the Spirit of KJAZ. It’s still the great sound of KJAZ that went off the air 14 years ago. And I can listen to WNYC2, albeit from a tiny speaker so the HD experience is lost. Although I spend most of my time here in an office/studio with a lot of high-end audio gear, I don’t bother to pipe the WiFi Radio’s line output through the fancy speakers. So far, I like the non-imposing little-box sound. Yeah, it makes no sense to me, either. Go figure.

Videobloggers Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson have been posing as tourists in Beijing for the past ten days, but actually turning their cameras towards the Free-Tibet protests that have been so aggressively squashed by the Chinese government. Xeni Jardin managed to interview Jay and Ryanne on a Skype video call and published it on Boing Boing TV. [full story]

When I started a web-hosting company back in 1995, we used bakery racks to hold Sun servers — mostly ES-450s, as I recall. The first real Internet data centers were then based on the designs of the telco industry, starting at 100 watts/sq ft, working their way up to 300 watts/sq ft for fairly dense server farms. Air conditioning was usually the biggest problem. As server densities increased, many aging data centers were only able to use a portion of their floorspace because they couldn’t supply enough cooling for the newer servers. As expensive as they were, it was very hard to design and build a data center that would be able to handle the increased densities five years down the road. Looking back only 13 years later, we had no idea how steep the scale curve would become.

Now, as Ina Fried reports at cnet, Microsoft (and I assume others) are buying servers not by the box or even by the rack, but pre-assembled and fully networked in shipping containers with densities of thousands of watts/sq foot. They have to. They’re adding 10,000 servers a month. They don’t repair or replace individual servers when they fail. They just monitor the total number of working servers in the container. When some percentage of the servers have failed, they yank the entire container and send it back to the supplier for refurbishing. Or, if the technology has improved, a container can simply be replaced with one that has even more-densely packed servers. (I assume that that each container has its own air conditioning and just requires water in/out.)

With densities like this, the big guys (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) are primarily in the electrical-power business. In some cases, they’re even building (or planning to build) their own generating facilities. It only took a decade to get to this point. Hard to imagine how we’ll be building data centers in another ten years.

Here’s another big one. The FCC gets it. They’ve delivered a thrashing to Comcast. Professor Lessig wrote a five-page response [pdf] to the Commissions three-page summary [pdf] of their 34-page order [pdf]. We won’t know for a few months the extent to which Comcast complies or digs in their heels, but this is not only a round for the good guys, it also puts into federal print a good precendential explanation of the issues. Just having this order on the record will help make the case for net neutrailty as the battle rages on. [source: Lessig]

Having lived through the transition starting with the Carterfone decision, it’s easy to understand how important this is to innovation.

Not just a criticism of McCain’s policies, but an excellent explanation of the importance of net neutrality and other broadband policy issues. This video is in the sae style as Lawrence Lessig’s live slide presentations, which are always entertaining and provocative. Lessig as FCC Chairman in an Obama administration? [source]

A “ducker” is an audio tool (traditionally hardware, but now also in software) that reduces the level of one track when there’s a signal on another track. It’s very common in talk shows, where you want the host of the show to have priority and override the voices of guests. A ducker is extremely useful for cleaning up two-track interview recordings, such as those from Skype.

As of release 1.3.3 (currently in beta), the open-source audio package Audacity has included an “Auto Duck” feature, which could be quite helpful if you record/edit two-track interviews, particularly from phone calls or Skype.

I’m experimenting with Fulfillment by Amazon. So far, so good. Seems to be run with the same quality of infrastructure as Amazon Web Services and the rest of Amazon.com. For a limited time — not sure how long — we’re offering my most-recent book, Loosely Coupled, The Missing Pieces of Web Services, at a 50% discount. You should see the $19.99 price from RDS Press. Let me know whether the fulfillment and delivery meet your expectations.

Okay, so this has nothing to do with the topics I usually blog about, but I happen to be here in Las Vegas for the New Media Expo this week. I took advantage of the trip and brought my wife along with the enticement of seeing two Cirque du Soliel shows. Even if you’re not a Cirque fan, this is for you.

There are actually six very different Cirque du Soleil shows Las Vegas, and I’d guess the most-popular one is ‘O‘, although ‘Love‘ may have taken over that honor. We saw ‘Love’ tonight. It’s essentially a typical Cirque du Soleil show based on the music of the Beatles in a huge theatre. This isn’t your typical circus-in-a-tent show like the traveling Cirque du Soleil. Shows like these can’t ever tour — the theatres are essentially built uniquely for them. Perhaps the best part of ‘Love’ is that they’ve absolutely perfected the techniques of flying people around a large theatre at high speeds on wires, trapeze and bungee. It’s not just dramatic, it’s also incredibly graceful. Overall, the show is a bit confusing, and I think it’s fair to say that perhaps it emphasizes the psychedelic aspects of the Beatles’ lives and music. The show is extremely trippy, and as my wife agreed, I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of people come stoned. There’s so much going on at once, it can be difficult to know what to watch.

If I’d only seen ‘Love’ while here in Las Vegas, I wouldn’t be writing this post. The reason I’m blogging is the Cirque du Soleil show we saw last night: ‘KÀ‘. I’d never heard of it before. I bought the tickets only because I couldn’t get them for ‘O’. But I’ve got to say, ‘KÀ’ is one of the most amazing theatrical events I’ve ever seen. (Note: My wife and I are both former drama majors.) The starting point for ‘KÀ’s greatness can be summarized in one word: hydraulics. It’s in a massive theatre, seating maybe 4,000 people. The proscenium is perhaps 80-100 feet high. But the major element of the set is a fully articulated platform that’s something like 40×60 feet. Maybe even larger. The platform starts out at floor level, but imagine your flatscreen TV with one of those VESA mounts on the rear with an arm that allows it to be turned and twisted in three dimensions. Then imagine it flipping vertical (or even past vertical), loaded with a cast of dancer/acrobats. Effortlessly and silently, it becomes the size of a six-story building. Two of the most amazing scenes are performed in this vertical position. This photo of one of those scenes doesn’t really do it justice. The wall is, in fact, vertical and the performers are not wired. I won’t even try to describe some of the uses of this platform. And don’t think it’s gimmicky — it’s not. The set and staging would be way over-the-top in other contexts, but it all works seamlessly here. The video trailer also undersells the show.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t just about a set design. Everything about this show is superb, cast included. Lighting, sound, music, choreography (martial arts including Capoeira) — all superb. It’s been running for a year, two shows/day five days/week, which means over two million people have seen it. But I think it’s Cirque du Soleil’s sleeper show here. If you’re going to Las Vegas and can afford the tickets, this is the show I’d recommend.

Update: Here’s a trailer on YouTube that shows a bit more. Think of “martial arts meets steampunk.” Wikipedia says the platform is 25×50 feet and weighs 50 tons. Writing in the New York Times, Steve Friess called it “Metrolpolis meets Blade Runner” and says the theatre cost $135 million to construct and holds 1,950 seats.

As Larry Lessig says, this is huge.

…the [Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit] has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

A big step forward for validation of Creative Commons and GPL licenses. Congratulations to all who fought for this for the rest of us.

It’s time to take The Conversations Network mobile. That means two things: (1) a lightweight version of the website design suitable for all mobile browsers, and (2) an iPhone 2.0 dedicated application. The former has been on the to-do list for some time, and the number of requests has been growing steadily. The latter is (for now) just for fun, but I’d love to see what could be done. We need help for both projects.

Question: What’s the latest/best standard for mobile apps? What flavor of XML/HTML, etc? I’m so out of touch on this. The last thing I remember dabbling with was WAP when developing for mobile devices was brand new. Where should I look to ramp-up on developing for mobile browsers?

Opportunity: I don’t have the personal bandwidth to get up-to-speed on iPhone development, but if anyone wants to volunteer to create an iPhone app for The Conversations Network, I’ll gladly handle the back-end development.

AIR: And I’d also love to see an application for The Conversations Network based on Adobe AIR. From the few AIR apps I’ve used to date, I’ve been impressed with the UI as well as the cross-platform installation and update processes.

With all of my problems and grousing about the iPhone 2.0 upgrade, MobileMe, etc., I do have something positive to say. One 2.0 application I find surprisingly good is the New York Times viewer. Not only is it a clean, simple program (which is mandatory for a small mobile screen), but it turns out to be a great way to read the newspaper. Who knew? Good timing, too, since I just canceled my home-delivery subscription. It appears to be the full stories and there’s just enough of the photos and graphics. None of the other apps I’ve tried are as interesting, and quite a few of them crash rather easily (Movies). One of them even rebooted my iPod Touch (Where). BofA is another handy vendor-specific app. Twitterific also looks pretty good. I may start using that as y primary client. I sort of like having Twitter in a handheld device even while working on a desktop or laptop machine. Something about the immediacy and separateness from my mainstream work.

I predict that we’re only seeing the beginning of Apple’s horribly botched migration from .Mac to MobileMe. I’ve been following the discussions on the Apple’s forums, and I’m not the only one with some rather serious problems. My personal issues (shared by others) include:

• Usernames aren’t necessarily carried over to Mobile Me. My .Mac ID is dougkaye@mac.com. But apple has allowed someone else to register the ID dougkaye@me.com.
• iDisk is down, and there’s no word from Apple when it will be fixed. I rely in iDisk to keep multiple computers in sync. I store all sorts of things there such as a page of bookmarks and a password database (using 1Password). This a fee-based service, and the multi-day outage is a significant blunder.
• My fear is that when you combine the above two issues, the recovery is going to be ugly. The WebDAV configuration used to access the iDisk appears to also be hosed or at least confused.

I don’t normally think in these terms, but if I were running Apple, there are a number of people who would lose their jobs over the way the iPhone/iPod 2.0 and MobileMe migration has been deployed. I’ll cut Twitter some slack for their infrastructure problems — they’re still a startup — but Apple has no excuse. This will cost them bigtime in their efforts to penetrate the enterprise market. And I’m going to pass on buying that iPhone after all. I think I’ll just stick with my Blackberry and iPod Touch for now. I’ve lost a lot of faith in Apple over this.

Update 7/12/08 1:30pmPDT: Tried a Software Update and got MobileMe 1.1. I can know access my iDisk, but for some reason they moved it from file:///Volumes/iDisk/ to file:///Volumes/dougkaye/, so code I’ve written to use the iDisk has to be reconfigured. Still can’t login to MobileMe via System Preferences, however. Doesn’t like my auth.

PayPal is a valuable service, but there are parts of it that just suck. Here at The Conversations Network, we use PayPal (a) to receive membership dues and donations, and (b) to distribute payments to TeamITC. It’s been very difficult to balance the account because of the way PayPal holds onto funds (to their advantage) and only deposits the difference between receipts and disbursements back to our BofA account. So a week ago I decided to open a second PayPal account, tied to a new BofA account. It was easy enough to setup, link the BofA account and make a round of payments to our team.

A few days later, we got an email message that they needed more documentation: copy of a voided check, IRS non-profit determination letter, etc. No problem. We uploaded it to them the same day.

But yesterday I discovered we’ve fallen into a Catch 22. First, Paypal canceled all the payments we made to TeamITC earlier this month. (They’d never gone through, it turns out.) Second, they’ve essentially frozen the account. Third, the funds that should have gone to our team are stuck in the PayPal account. They refuse to return it to the BofA account. So we can’t make payments and we can’t get back a few thousand dollars that PayPal so happily withdrew from our bank. The reason? They say they can’t accept a “starter” check as verification of the account. (Silly, given that they don’t seem to have any trouble withdrawing funds from that account.) Since we don’t plan to use this account for anything other than PayPal, there’s no reason to print checks. As an alternative, they’ll accept a bank statement, but we won’t get our first one for more than two weeks. PayPal refuses to accept anything else such as a letter from BofA.

I’ve spent about 1.5 hours on the phone with PayPal people, none of whom had the authority to solve our problem. The last person said I’d have to email the Compliance department. We’ll see how that works and how long it takes to hear from them.

What we need is a reasonable competitor to PayPal. Neither Amazon nor Google are there yet. Amazon won’t allow us to pay people outside of the U.S. and Google doesn’t (AFAIK) support outbound payments at all.

Update: With a little help from the PayPal executive offices — it helps to have influential readers of your blog — we seemed to have resolved this quickly. It appears we fell under the compliance obligations imposed by the (U.S.) Patriot Act and financial regulators for KYC (”Know Your Customer”) and AML (”Anti-Money Laundering”). It looks as though all non-profits are now, by default, considered terrorist organizations until proven otherwise, and opening a bank account without printing checks is a red-flag warning of intentions to launder money. It’s going to take a while to sort out which payments went through and which didn’t. Some are clearly marked as “Canceled” while others are simply “Uncleared,” but we should be able to get payments to our international team of “terrorist” writers and audio editors in the next few days. (I can only imagine what a field day the NSA’s text scanners will have with this paragraph.) Not that I wouldn’t still like to see some good honest competition for the PayPal near-monopoly.

Guess I should have read the fine print. I downloaded a movie rental from iTunes. 30 days to watch it — okay. My wife and I started watching it yesterday, but she fell asleep. We went to watch the rest of it tonight — afte rthe house cooled off a bit from all the heat here — but no luck. iTunes only allows you 24 hours from the time you start watching the movie, then it just disappears. Seems like a ridiculous restriction to me. I think I’ll just stick with Netflix for now.

Update: I complained to Apple via a web form, and to their credit they gave me another download/viewing without question. And they replied very quickly, particularly considering how busy they must be today (iPhone 2.0). I still don’t like the policy, but at least Apple’s iTunes support works.

In my research planning our new site for finding and sharing recordings of spoken-word events, I came across Soundflavor, a site doing something similar for music. I’m still learning my way around Soundflavor, but it seems to me that it has nearly all the features we want in a spoken-word site, and it seems to be very well implemented. Looking at Soundflavor, what would you do differently for a spoken-word finding/sharing service?

Now that we’ve got OpenID running as a login/registration option on The Conversations Network, I’m concerned about a particular weakness. Maybe the Identity Gurus can help me out.

I’ve taken the advice of others and allowed registered members to attach multiple OpenIDs to their CN logins. It’s very convenient. For example, I can login with http://dkaye.myopenid.com, http://rds.com (a delegated OpenID) or a variety of others. But this isn’t solving an important problem that I think it should. What happens when I, as an OpenID owner, change my email address? I’d like to just change it in one place (my OpenID provider’s site) and have that change automatically propagate to the sites where I use my OpenID the next time I log into them (if not before). The service providers allow me to change my email address and that address is transmitted to the sites when I use my OpenID.

The problem is that because we receive those email addresses from potentially multiple providers, they can be different. And when we receive an email address as part of an OpenID authentication transaction, we have no idea whether we’re supposed to change our database to reflect that new email address or not. Bottom line: We have no choice but to ignore the email address we receive except the very first time when we can use it as the default for a registration-form field.

I thought OpenId credentials were like the old wallet concept, but how is a web site supposed to deal with an individual who supplies multiple wallets? Am I missing something here?

I can’t tell you why, but Tony Hirst has use the clip/excerpt feature from The Conversations Network as part of a pad-triggered JavaScript audio demo. All sorts of things are possible.

I’ve spent the last three days trying to implement OpenID for The Conversations Network’s web sites. I’m familiar with the concepts and protocols, so I figured it wouldn’t take much effort. I guess that’s what I get for being so self-confident. I still don’t have a solution to the current snag. Maybe someone else knows a workaround or at least some search engine will find this so others can avoid the traps I’ve fallen into.

All our sites are built on PHP5. I develop on OS X, check my code into Subversion, then checkout onto our live servers running RHEL. I chose the OpenID Enabled library. It’s really the only choice as far as I know.

I don’t know whether it’s a bug, poor documentation, or just our peculiar architecture, but there was an incompatibility between OpenID Enabled and my code that took about 12 hours to find. (If the URL of your response receiver includes a query string, you’ll have some extra work to do.) I finally got past that, coded new pages for login, registration and managing multiple OpenIDs for a user, and checked it into svn. I installed the library on the RHEL server and updated the code there. Didn’t work.

It turns out that the OpenID Enabled library needs an XML parser, either domxml (which is no longer available) or the newer/better DOM, which comes with the PHP 5 core code. But we use yum, and the yummy version of PHP5 was built with the –disable-dom option. So no XML parser and hence no OpenID. Aargh!

Sysadmin Tim doesn’t want to mess with another PHP5 build, and after years of working with him — and sometimes ignoring his advice — I’ve learned he’s always right. Surely, replacing our PHP5 (or even rebuilding it) would likely break something else. So I’m stuck until I can either find another OpenID library that doesn’t require the DOM XML parser, or some replacement for that parser. Too bad. OpenID is sort of cool.

Update: Problem solved. Just ran “%yum install php-xml” and restarted Apache. We now have OpenId across all The Conversations Network’s web sites.

Windows and OS X users can now download a new version (1.4.0) of The Levelator. A few small fixes and minor new features. If you’ve been stuck on a bug, it may be fixed in this version.

Podcasting pioneer and friend, Dave Slusher, is reviving his Reality Break radio series as a podcast. Dave honed his interviewing skills well before the advent of podcasting, and I’ve always appreciated his research and preparedness, which help make his programs a cut above the rest. For a while, Dave hosted the Voices in Your Head series on IT Conversations. The majority of Dave’s interviews are with authors, most notably those of science fiction.