A Day in Paradise

My Second audio blogpost… This one doesn’t have much interest to non technical people. Just me going on about a new description for podcasting. Because of popluar demand I don’t have any music this time.

FYI last week it was Mary Schnieder

Hey Adam, I love the show. I’ll keep this short since I know you’re busy.

The main problem that I see with the bandwidth issue is the format of the shows.

I’ll use the fantastic “I heard it on a Podcast” song which you’ve played twice:

4mb x 20,000 listeners (conservative number) x 2 = 160 gigs of traffic, that’s 80 gigs of traffic more than nessesary. As the song gains poplarity it will bounce around the podisphere and potentially generate thousands of gigabytes of unnessesary traffic.

Once the music is on my computer why should i need to download it again and again and again? The same goes for mashups, or promos.

The solution is really simple. Instead of serving up raw MP3s, create a format which describes the data being served. The podcatcher will keep a catalogue of the information on your computer, when it reads the format it decides what it needs to download and then fetches only the data that it does not have. The Podcast can then be listened to directly, or the segments can be compiled back into an MP3 file and dumped onto your iPod.

Using a system like this will allow authors to better index the podcasts themselves, not only using the descriptions in the metadata file, but also using standard technology like using regular mp3 players to index the actual content of the podcasts based on the ID3 tags.

It will also allow data to be served from central points. For example I have a music podcasts which plays music from the Podsafe music network, I will not have to supply the storage space or the outgoing bandwidth for all that music, but it will be streamed by the podsafe music network. This will also allow the artists to know who is playing which of their songs.

I understand that this will be a radical break from everything that has been done so far, but shuffling around 20mb files will never scale, and there is no way the 100 million listener march is going to take place with this technology. It’s better to break it now when it is only a year old than be faced with a much bigger problem in a year from now.

Aaron

BBC NEWS | UK | Family condemns police shooting

What more could a terrorist organisation want than to provoke a western government into killing their own people without the fear of recompense.

Anyone who reads this and thinks (or worse yet comments) that the extenuating circumstances made this case regrettable but an exceptable loss, is no better than the many people through history who justified the loss of life to attain a higher goal. Whether the end goal is Security, or the creation of a master race it doesn’t make any difference.

It’s not who we are, it’s what we do!

What we don’t hear anymore is that the police that killed this guy (brazillian electrician) were plainclothes police. If he was running at all he was running from MEN WITH REGULAR CLOTHES AND GUNS!

I find that highly disturbing.

This is just experimental, I don’t plan to start “podcasting” but was just fooling around… yes, I am a self important moron.

Listen here if you have the time and 9mb of extra bandwidth. I don’t know how this will work with RSS feeds, I added the enclosure tag to the WP “custom feilds” I’m not sure if that will do the trick.

Honestly I don’t care

BetaNews | Longhorn Gets a Name: Windows Vista

So right now we’re all chuckling, but we’re going to hear about this for the next few months, and it’ll sound perfectly normal and we won’t be able to imagine how it could have ever been called anything else.

Who hear didn’t gag when they first heard XP?

BBC NEWS | UK | Man shot by armed police on Tube

What ever happened to those good old batons which the bobbies have used to keep the peace in London for the last couple centuries? What about a taser?

The only logical reason why it MIGHT be nessesary to shoot someone is if they WERE just about to blow themselves up. If you were being chased by police with guns and were planning on blowing yourself up, then it would be smart to do so before the police were on top of you (or even in range for that matter).

Mr Whitby, told BBC News: “I was sitting on the train reading my paper.

“I heard a load of noise, people saying, ‘Get out, get down’!

“I saw an Asian guy run onto the train hotly pursued by three plain-clothes police officers.

“One of them was carrying a black handgun – it looked like an automatic – they pushed him to the floor, bundled on top of him and unloaded five shots into him.

“I saw the gun being fired five times into the guy – he’s dead.”

Five gunshots in a tube car must be deafening. Now we just need to find out if the guy did anything other than be asian and 6.2 feet tall with a backpack.

Note: Here are comments as left by BBC visitors

Why Frameworks Suck | devdev2040

Here’s an interesting blog entry which I picked up off John Herren’s 360 Blast.

It is a bit of a rant, but offers good defense of the humble library vs. the Enterprise frameworks.

I’m a library guy, I like a big set of tools available to call upon at need, I like to have a favorite hammer and a favorite saw and know the tricks for making them both fit on my belt without running into my legs when I am working on something. Framework people like the 5-in-1 lathe-press-drill-saw-grinder and figuring out the tricks to fit the piece of wood they are working on into the machine. When you have a framework everything will be lathe-press-drill-saw-grinded into submission, and you better read the manual otherwise the machine won’t even turn on.

…

Frameworks suck because they are an avatar of enterprise, frameworks suck because they take away your freedom, frameworks suck because they build walls between coders, frameworks suck because they make you fit your project to the toolset rather than the toolset to the project, and frameworks suck because they take the fun out of programming, long live the library.

And Long Live PEAR!

Wired News: Blog Bares Sex Offender’s Demons

Why is it that these articles always put the scariest things at the very end. This is a story about the blog of some psycho. I assume it was headline news in the US, but I have no idea what he’s done.

The blog (as these blogs do) got attention from the media and thousands of people start commenting. The final comment is:

“Why didn’t anyone on this blog report this activity to authorities,” another post asked. “This kind of thing is what the Patriot Act is supposed to help!?! Isn’t it?”

What kind of crazy crap is that? And Hacker-turned-Journalist, Kevin Poulsen really shouldn’t do this type of fear mongering in his articles. Obviously he wasn’t the one who wrote it, but seeing that he chose this comment over the 2000+ other comments available is a bad thing.

Software patent directive REJECTED – Tobias Schlitt – Weblog

Time to celebrate people! Software Patents have been rejected in Europe.

The European Parliament today decided by a large majority of 648 votes to reject the directive “on the patentability of computer implemented inventions”, also known as the software patent directive. This rejection was the logical answer to the Commission’s refusal to restart the legislative process in February and the Council’s unwillingness to take the will of the European Parliament and national parliaments into account. The FFII congratulates the European Parliament on its clear “No” to bad legislative proposals and procedures.

Whether or not you are a programmer this is a very significant vote and we all owe the great people at the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure and all the people who campaigned against this a lot of thanks!

EarthCore: A Podcast Novel

EarthCore was initially published as an ebook in 2001, in 2002 it was slated for a Nationwide paperback release, but the imprint was closed four months before the book was published. Riding the Podcasting wave Scott Sigler decided to pull “a cheap publicity stunt second only to a nude, ball-flapping, Secret Service ducking, 50-yard dash through the White House” and release the book as a podcast novel.

“You can’t buy EarthCore anywhere, so if you get hooked that’s your own problem. I’m trying to pimp you out here. I want you addicted to this novel.”

Now twenty-six chapters into the riveting story, over 5500 self-proclaimed “EarthCrack junkies” wait for their weekly fix.

There is no point giving you a rundown of the story, so far it is better far better than I expected. Scott’s clear performance is quite a bit better than the other author-performed audiobooks I’ve listened to. A comment in a recent review (which does have details of the plot) suggest that Scott should use a female to do the feminine voices, I disagree, this is an audio book, not a radio drama. Keep it to one voice.

The one thing that is different with this particular audio book is that you have no idea how much is left of the book. I enjoy holding a paperback in my hand and knowing that I still have two-thirds of the book left. Scott, how many chapters are there?

So get over to scottsigler.net and download the past episodes. I would suggest that for your own sanity that you listen to no more than a couple a week. Get all caught up in a couple sessions and you’ll end up one of the sorry EarthCrack junkies without their fix.

Note: Scott seems to be having distribution problems, so if you want to get up-to-date on the story but can’t download the story so far, just pop me an email and I’ll send you the files (please don’t ask for my email, this offer is limited to people who know me or are smart enough to figure out my email address).

We developed project X but “We were ahead of the times and our customers weren’t ready for it”.

Nice way of saying project X tanked. Must remember for the next meeting I go to.

Two female teachers have been suspended for allegedly having a threesome with a 16-year-old male pupil.

The Evening Standard said staff and students had been to the Harrow pub to celebrate the end of lessons before going back to a member of staff’s house.

It was there the teachers and the boy were alleged to have had sex, the newspaper reported.

Sounds like a pretty nice school… surprisingly he didn’t file charges.

Enterprise Open Source Roadshow

Frankfurt PHP Usergroup will be hosting Sandro Groganz and the 2005 “Enterprise Open Source Roadshow” in their September 20th Usergroup meeting. This is part of the Enterprise Open Source Roadshow which will be stopping at 5 cities in Germany and Austria.

There is a lot of planning to be done, the usergroup with work out an agenda and talks/discussion, but this promises to be a very interesting event, so make sure to mark it down on your calendars. If you live in the Frankfurt area, then please check out our site, join the mailing list and get involved TODAY.

NOTE: Date were wrong, change your calenders.