This is where you say something clever
No posting for a week while we’re off to the Inn of the Seventh Mountain outside of Bend, Oregon for a week of end-of-summer holiday.
Check out the perfect weather forecast!
A week of high desert relaxation and fun sounds like just what’s needed before the fall madness sets in.
I’m getting ready to spend the weekend in Bellingham at the 25 year reunion (I couldn’t possibly be that old, could I?) of the band I played in during the early ’80s, Eddie & The Atlantics.
Last night while rummaging through old band stuff I came across the first demo tape we did and the recording of our wild first birthday gig at the Rainbow Tavern (our home in Seattle), and I decided that I’d try to get them on my computer.
I dug up a cord to connect the RCA output jacks on my tape deck to the line-in mini-phone plug on my Mac, downloaded the excellent Audio Hijack application from Rogue Amoeba, used their LineIn app to get the line input into the audio subsystem, and I was off to the races!
I stayed up much too late working my way nostalgically through both tapes, and now have them safely ensconced in iTunes, where I can burn them to CDs for my old bandmates.
That oughta impress them.
Audio Hijack is a great small app and a great value for only $16.
As you may recall from July, Ashlee Vance had some critical commentary about our Dell/Napster deal in the Register.
That prompted a rather lively email exchange between the two of us, that started out sort of flamey on both our parts, but then turned into a substantive discussion of the issues around institutions getting involved in providing music downloading services for students. I’ll post some of that discussion soon, but one result was that Ashlee invited me to write an op-ed piece on the topic for the Reg.
That piece has just been published, under the headline How Napster and DRM arrived at University of Washington. They even put in a picture!
All in all, it’s been great chatting with Ashlee about the topic, and it’s very nice of the Reg to offer the opportunity to get my opinion in.
Google has released it’s IM service, dubbed Google Talk. There’s a native Windows client that does voice as well as text, and there are instructions for configuring other IM clients for use, including iChat, Gaim, Trillian, and Adium.
I haven’t tried it on Windows yet, but it works fine with Adium on OS X.
I’m orensr if you’re looking for me – see you online.
Now this is totally cool – the Beastie Boys have posted a bunch of files of just the vocal tracks of their tunes, complete with beats-per-minute info. All set to remix onto your favorite loops!
Thanks, Cory!
Mitch is talking about the future of the Mozilla projects and how they relate to OSAF projects. He likened Mozilla to being similar to Harry Potter – having lived with the repressive aunt and uncle while it was Netscape, and having blossomed into unanticipated success with Firefox.
In this conversation Mitch is very careful to note that his role at Mozilla is as the chair of the board of the Foundation, not as someone in charge of product direction or priorities.
The new Mozilla Corporation is organizing around the product development at Mozilla, working very hard on Firefox 1.5 and looking ahead at 2.0, with a lot of work going on in the graphics rendering engine, etc.
There is a Mozilla project that is working towards making Python a first-class language for Mozilla development. Mitch notes that it’s just not realistic to expect devlopers to write Mozilla extensions in Javascript these days. This could make integration between Chandler and Mozilla easier.
There is a Chandler project getting started to look at whether it makes sense to look at moving Chandler’s cross-platform GUI development tools from wxWidgets to XUL (the platform used by Mozilla). This would be a large long-term shift which would not take place before Chandler 1.0 is released.
One possible Chandler parcel that could integrate with Firefox – Integrating web-browsing stuff with email, tasks, and calendaring. Effectively types everything you look at in Firefox as Chandler items that can be searched and integrated with other stuff in the Chandler repository, synchronized, and shared.
Mozilla is kind of a platform and kind of not – it’s very hard to build applications other than a browser on top of the code base. That is slowly being addressed, but certainly makes it difficult for Thunderbird to progress. There are questions about how good is good enough – what should be the aspirations for Thunderbird?
Mitch is talking about the future of the Mozilla projects and how they relate to OSAF projects. He likened Mozilla to being similar to Harry Potter – having lived with the repressive aunt and uncle while it was Netscape, and having blossomed into unanticipated success with Firefox.
In this conversation Mitch is very careful to note that his role at Mozilla is as the chair of the board of the Foundation, not as someone in charge of product direction or priorities.
The new Mozilla Corporation is organizing around the product development at Mozilla, working very hard on Firefox 1.5 and looking ahead at 2.0, with a lot of work going on in the graphics rendering engine, etc.
There is a Mozilla project that is working towards making Python a first-class language for Mozilla development. Mitch notes that it’s just not realistic to expect devlopers to write Mozilla extensions in Javascript these days. This could make integration between Chandler and Mozilla easier.
There is a Chandler project getting started to look at whether it makes sense to look at moving Chandler’s cross-platform GUI development tools from wxWidgets to XUL (the platform used by Mozilla). This would be a large long-term shift which would not take place before Chandler 1.0 is released.
One possible Chandler parcel that could integrate with Firefox – Integrating web-browsing stuff with email, tasks, and calendaring. Effectively types everything you look at in Firefox as Chandler items that can be searched and integrated with other stuff in the Chandler repository, synchronized, and shared.
Mozilla is kind of a platform and kind of not – it’s very hard to build applications other than a browser on top of the code base. That is slowly being addressed, but certainly makes it difficult for Thunderbird to progress. There are questions about how good is good enough – what should be the aspirations for Thunderbird?
We’re talking this morning about the requirements for calendar access from mobile devices. There are widespread deployments of SyncML in the mobile device space. There also is talk about creating CalDAV clients on mobile devices – there is at least one proof-of-concept implementation on a J2ME platform. OSAF is gathering information about where the CSG schools are with mobile devices.
I’m in San Francisco for a two-day session at OSAF for CSG member schools to take a look at the current status of Chandler and the evolving requirements in higher education for Chandler and associated products.
Sheila just finished showing us the most current build of Chandler as they work towards 0.6. She showed Chandler subscribing to a calendar published from a Mozilla calendar client onto a CalDAV server built on the UW Calendar platform by the folks at RPI.
Woo-hoo! Nice work, folks!
I’m in San Francisco for a two-day session at OSAF for CSG member schools to take a look at the current status of Chandler and the evolving requirements in higher education for Chandler and associated products.
Sheila just finished showing us the most current build of Chandler as they work towards 0.6. She showed Chandler subscribing to a calendar published from a Mozilla calendar client onto a CalDAV server built on the UW Calendar platform by the folks at RPI.
Woo-hoo! Nice work, folks!
