Archive for May, 2005

Another great lineup at the Vancouver Folk Fest

Published May 25, 2005 Music Closed

The lineup for this year’s Vancouver Folk Music Festival is out – and it looks like another fabulous year.

Some favorites from last year are back – including my son’s favorites the Wailin’ Jennys and BC fiddler Oliver Schroer.

Some great bluegrass and old time music from Mike Seeger and Jonathan Reischman and the Jaybirds.

Texas singer/songwriter Eliza Gilkyson, who I last saw in the mid-80s in LA opening a show for X when her brother Tony was briefly in the band, will be there, as will the great Iris Dement.

And I’m very excited to hear the The Grande Mothers, a band featuring former Mothers of Invention Napoleon Murphy Brock, Don Preston, and Roy Estrada. If only they had Ruth Underwood.

And of course, the most wonderful parts of the festival will be the unexpected new discoveries of people and sounds previously unimagined.

It’s a great festival, and if you haven’t ever been, I highly recommend it!

Project Aardvark – software built by interns in one summer

Published May 25, 2005 Uncategorized Closed

I know I’ll be following this.

Joel Spolksy and his Fog Creek Software company have hired four summer interns and are giving them a project to build a new software product from scratch over the summer. Should be interesting!

As I wrote earlier, “This summer, Fog Creek Software has hired four summer interns from Yale, Duke, and Rose-Hulman. Our selection process was extremely competitive, with over 800 kids applying for only four positions.

“Instead of wasting their talents giving them the usual dull and unimportant tasks of a typical summer internship, we decided to let the interns create a complete new software product, from beginning to end, over the course of one summer. With experienced software developers as mentors, the team will design, program, test, and roll out a complete software product over the course of one hectic summer, going from concept to paying customers in about ten weeks.”

Copying image location – Safari vs. Firefox

Published May 25, 2005 Technology Closed

I was writing my previous post, about the new Nokia 770 Internet Appliance, and I wanted to insert a remotely linked image in the post (from Mobile Gazette).

I was using Safari on my iMac. I ctrl-clicked on the image, selected Copy Image Address and got:

nokia-770-3.jpg

Obviously, pasting that into my post is not very helpful, as the image doesn’t reside on my web server.

So I fired up Firefox, ctrl-clicked on the image, selected Copy Image Location, and got:

http://www.mobilegazette.com/images/nokia/nokia-770-1.jpg

Much more gooder.

New Nokia 770 internet browsing tablet device

Published May 25, 2005 Gadgets & Gear Closed

Now this looks cool -

4.13 inch diagonal screen, about a half-pound, 802.11b and bluetooth, debian and gnome derived software infrastructure.

More on it here.

Good writings about the music biz

Published May 20, 2005 Music , Technology Closed

There’s a terrific article by James Surowiecki in last week’s New Yorker (May 16 issue) titled Hello Cleveland, where he describes the ways in which musicians are making more money from playing live than they are from selling recorded music. Well worth a read.

The upshot is that the fortunes of musicians and the fortunes of music labels have less and less to do with each other. This may be the first stage of what John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Dead, once called the shift from “the music business” to “the musician business.” In the musician business, the assets that once made the major labels so important—promotion, distribution, shelf space—matter less than the assets that belong to the artists, such as their ability to perform live. As technology has grown more sophisticated, the ways in which artists make money have grown more old-fashioned. The value of songs falls, and the value of seeing an artist sing them rises, because that experience can’t really be reproduced.

I was encouraged the other day to see Yahoo’s new Yahoo Music Unlimited service announced. Unlimited downloads of music for $5 a month (if you pay for an annual plan). Currently there’s over a million songs to pick from. Unfortunately, at the moment it’s for Windows only, and the songs are in the heavily DRM’ed version of Windows Media, but it’s a good indication that there’s starting to be the right kind of downward pressure on prices in the legal download world.

Barry Ritholz points out in his blog that this brings the value of ten years of unlimited music downloads to the low, low, price of $600. He further notes that this Kinda makes it hard to argue that losses per P2P user are in the 10s of thousands of dollars annually when $600 per 10 years is what it costs for a comparable substitute.

Mark Cuban (owner of the Landmark Theater chain, the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, and the angel funder of the Grokster defense) writes that this means that :

The RIAA can no longer claim that students who are downloading music are costing them thousands of dollars each. They can’t claim much of anything actually. In essence, Yahoo just turned possession of a controlled music substance into a misdemeanor. Payable by a $5 per month fine.

Of course, RIAA staffers won’t go quietly into the night. They will continue to scream loud and hard about evils of illegal downloading. The question is, will they move the money they are currently spending on court cases and filing suit, towards promoting the new subscription services that are available. Particularly Yahoo’s dirt cheap service.

Larry Smarr on research computing and networks

Published May 13, 2005 Learning & Teaching , Technology Closed

Larry Smarr is one of the people at the center of the use of high speed networks and high performance distributed computing to move scientific research forward.

There’s a new video online of the keynote talk he gave in January at the JGN II symposium. Interestingly enough, he gave the talk in Seattle, and it was shown on HD video, streamed live over the Internet to Osaka.

The talk is an illuminating survey of some of the scientific activity that is being enabled by very high speed networks and some of the work that’s being done to create the networks that these scientific efforts require.

In order to get the most out of the talk, you need to watch Larry in one window and click along with his presentation slides in another window.

I watched this in my office, viewing the high def 5 megabit per second version of the video, and it was amazingly clear and detailed – by far the best streamed video I’ve seen yet on a desktop computer. At this kind of resolution video really does become something rich and compelling, instead of just something annoying (which is what I usually find streaming video to be).

Unfortunately, the video only works with Windows Media on Windows – on the Mac I could get the audio but not the video.

It’s well worth watching this presentation if you have any interest in how science is actually being done these days.

Larry Smarr on research computing and networks

Published May 13, 2005 Learning & Teaching , Technology Closed

Larry Smarr is one of the people at the center of the use of high speed networks and high performance distributed computing to move scientific research forward.

There’s a new video online of the keynote talk he gave in January at the JGN II symposium. Interestingly enough, he gave the talk in Seattle, and it was shown on HD video, streamed live over the Internet to Osaka.

The talk is an illuminating survey of some of the scientific activity that is being enabled by very high speed networks and some of the work that’s being done to create the networks that these scientific efforts require.

In order to get the most out of the talk, you need to watch Larry in one window and click along with his presentation slides in another window.

I watched this in my office, viewing the high def 5 megabit per second version of the video, and it was amazingly clear and detailed – by far the best streamed video I’ve seen yet on a desktop computer. At this kind of resolution video really does become something rich and compelling, instead of just something annoying (which is what I usually find streaming video to be).

Unfortunately, the video only works with Windows Media on Windows – on the Mac I could get the audio but not the video.

It’s well worth watching this presentation if you have any interest in how science is actually being done these days.

More on widget security

Published May 12, 2005 Technology Closed

In response to my earlier post on security in Apple’s new Dashboard Widgets, John Gruber, who writes the Daring Fireball blog, replies:


It’s interesting that you’re not getting the first-run warning, but I don’t think the overall threat is any more serious than with normal Mac software. What’s to stop *any* of the apps listed every day on VersionTracker from doing these things? Trojan horses are easy to write.

Exploits would be tough, because it would imply they could spread from one machine to another, or that you could have a malicious widget injected into your machine without knowing.

So, no, I don’t think widgets are going to pose a security problem. That’s not to say I’m certain, however.

And he’s got a point.

But I do note that with Tiger, Apple has really beefed up the warning about installing executable software files, precisely at the same time as they’re encouraging everyone to download and install lots of widgets.

Zephyr pointed out a Slashdot post about zaptaastic, which actually demonstrates installing a “slightly evil widget” (don’t visit the page with Safari). This demonstrates the autoinstalling of widgets done by Safari. Zap makes the same point I just did above:

“So what?” you may say, “The user gets warned.”. Two words: social engineering. The Macintosh user base is rapidly being conditioned that widgets are harmless little toys, and Apple’s warning is fairly innocuous:

goatse.cx is being run for the first time.
Are you sure you want to run this widget?

That doesn’t look particularly threatening. I haven’t tried any actually destructive things; I would assume that getting root is a lot easier when you’re starting from inside the host box. I wonder how many of the gmail passwords entered by users in flores and coras are the same as the root password?

It would be obscenely easy for me to harvest passwords in those applications, by the way… but I don’t. I could just generate hits on http://stephan.com/watch.html?username:password and then go read my system logs.

127.0.0.1 – - [05/May/2005:02:49:11 -0400] “GET /widgets/flores/index.html?foo:bar HTTP/1.1″ 200 5758

Even without root, though, there are some pretty interesting things you could do. A widget, for example, could use time when it is hidden to add tags to every .html page stored in the users home directory. If the user happens to be running a web server – or even uploading files to one – this could propagate a widget to other machines. I’m not really a security expert, I’m sure others can think of worse things to do.

Apple has significantly lowered the bar for malicious entities to install and execute damaging code in OSX. Honestly, I don’t think this is that big of a deal – causing real damage is likely a bit harder than I make it sound.

DJ Spooky on sampling and copyright

Published May 11, 2005 Music , Technology Closed

Wired News has a good interview with DJ Spooky, who has a new book out called Rhythm Science. He talks about the culture of sampling and the legalities around copyright and re-use of materials.

WN: There was a recent case of NWA using a snippet of George Clinton’s music, and a court ruled that even though the sample was unrecognizable, NWA still had to secure rights to use it.

Miller: That means they didn’t change it enough. Basic rule of thumb: … you don’t want to get sued.

It’s a nightmare. There (are) lawyers. There are websites who filter through all records — everything. People are paid to just listen to music at this point and listen for samples….

In the same way a lot of people involved with internet hacking culture will hack your site and then call you up and say “By the way, we have security services we’d like to offer you,” you might get a little phone call saying, “There is a sample on your record that we heard, and we’d be more than happy to clear it for you.” Of course implying that if you don’t, the next phone call will be to the people you sampled.

It’s a paradoxical world. On one hand, sampling is a homage to your favorite records and favorite sounds, but you have to pay through the nose if you feel like doing that.

Endless Frontier Postponed – Ed Lazowska editorial in Science

Published May 9, 2005 Politics , Technology Closed

There’s an excellent editorial in the new issue of Science magazine (May 6, 2005 issue) by our very own Ed Lazowska (professor of Computer Science here at Washington) that takes the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to task for abandoning its responsibility for funding visionary basic research in computing.

Next month, U.S. scientists Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn will receive computing’s highest prize,
the A. M. Turing Award, from the Association for Computing Machinery. Their Transmission Control
Protocol (TCP), created in 1973, became the language of the Internet. Twenty years later, the Mosaic
Web browser gave the Internet its public face. TCP and Mosaic illustrate the nature of computer
science research, combining a quest for fundamental understanding with considerations of use. They
also illustrate the essential role of government-sponsored university-based research in producing the
ideas and people that drive innovation in information technology (IT).

Recent changes in the U.S. funding landscape have put this innovation pipeline at risk. The Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded TCP. The shock of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 led to the creation
of the agency, which was charged with preventing future technological surprises. From its inception, DARPA funded
long-term nonclassified IT research in academia, even during several wars, to leverage all the best minds. Much of this
research was dual-use, with the results ultimately advancing military systems
and spurring the IT industry.

U.S. IT research grew largely under DARPA and the National Science
Foundation (NSF). NSF relied on peer review, whereas DARPA bet on vision and
reputation, complementary approaches that served the nation well. Over the past
4 decades, the resulting research has laid the foundation for the modern micro-
processor, the Internet, the graphical user interface, and single-user workstations.
It has also launched new fields such as computational science. Virtually every
aspect of IT that we rely on today bears the stamp of federally sponsored research.
A 2003 National Academies study provided 19 examples where such work
ultimately led to billion-dollar industries, an economic benefit that reaffirms
science advisor Vannevar Bush’s 1945 vision in Science: The Endless Frontier.

However, in the past 3 years, DARPA funding for IT research at universities
has dropped by nearly half. Policy changes at the agency, including increased
classification of research programs, increased restrictions on the participation
of noncitizens, and “go/no-go” reviews applied to research at 12- to 18-month
intervals, discourage participation by university researchers and signal a shift from pushing the leading edge to “bridging
the gap” between fundamental research and deployable technologies. In essence, NSF is now relied on to support the
long-term research needed to advance the IT field.

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